Behind the Screen

A son dissects his parents’ marriage – they were film icons in 1960s Myanmar. It turns out the heartrending scenes they acted out on the silver screen are a pretty accurate reflection of their real lives. While the camera slides across the glamour photos from their heyday, the filmmaker looks on, entranced. He grapples with the incredible fame of his parents. Now that he is reconstructing their relationship, he sees the old film footage through different eyes – as if it might contain the answers he didn’t get as a child, when his parents separated. This merging of family history and film excerpts creates a magical mix of fact and fiction, or 'the real and the celluloid wedding', as the son calls it. The son’s public revelation of how things went wrong is an emancipatory act, as divorce is still a big taboo in Myanmar.