In 2009, two reporters, Tristan Mendès France and Gaël Bordier travelled to Burma to secretly shoot a satirical documentary on its absurd dictatorship and its consequences on Burmese lives.
From the most mundane part of daily routine to the highest levels of government, the consequences of the dictatorship’s ridiculous decisions are in plain view.
“Happy World” is a journey into this dictatorship of the absurd.
Burma has been suffering the torments of an iron dictatorship from the beginning of its independence in 1962. Ever since, the democratic opposition and ethnic minorities have faced permanent repression.
The democratic protests of 1988 were quashed with blood. Many monks lost their lives in 2007’s Saffron Revolution. That’s without counting the disastrous management of Cyclone Nargis, which hit the country in May 2008, taking the lives of more than 100,000 Burmese and left one million homeless that to this day have yet to receive international assistance.
A symbol of protest against the regime, Aung San Suu Kyi, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, has been constantly harassed by the Burmese authorities since the 1990s. The dictatorial regime has been operating in a vacuum for the past 40 years. Over the course of these years of isolation, it has developed extreme paranoia and a marked inclination for the irrational. Thus, in the entourage of the Burmese military you can find numerologists, astrologers, or magicians, consulted in the making of every important decision: the country’s name, changing the location of the capital, currency, agriculture, traffic, repression, astrologers are systematically consulted and their advice followed. Today, the country beats to the rhythm of loopy decisions, each one more absurd than the other, and its principal victim is the Burmese population itself.
The Device
The film is online under a Creative Commons license, which enables anyone not only to broadcast it (which means they can grab the white label device and disseminate it), but to download it too.
“Happy World” is a hypervideo experience co-produced by Cinquième Etage Production et Upian.com.
The censurator
In order to promote the program, we developed a viral campaign that allowed any user to invade the twitter account of any other user with the caracters of the movie. Here is a screencast of the result.
The result?
A 30-minute documentary, in the original French and in English, specifically created and edited for the Internet, presented within an HTML 5 shell designed to display additional information.