Holly Fisher's Kalama Sutta: Seeing is Believing

Post Cold War legacies -- militarism, human rights and environmental abuse, and ethnic genocide -- are linked in this poetic and collage-like 'living history' of Burma. Three weeks traveling inside confirmed that the only access to what was really going on was through conversations with refugees and exiles; the internet; and assorted media. Never has so much information been available at a time when it is equally possible for a tourist to savor The Golden Land without knowing that Burma is ruled by one of the most brutal military dictatorships on the planet. The viewer's project here is to make meaning and/or an emotional connection to a place colonized by the British for a century, where the junta seeks business via the internet while the ethnics fetch water in hollow bamboo.

The focus is on Burma; yet Burma here acts as conduit to explore common vulnerabilities in an increasingly globalized world.  History, memory, and myth collide in all Fisher's work that seeks resonance by what is missing -- between frames, images, ideas.  "I make films to explore the unfamiliar, to go beyond borders, myths, cliches, or other assumptions about how we see the world.  Past, present, future, circle in a construct of on-going present-ness, or presence.  In the end I seek to ignite a heightened sense of being alive."

"To me this film is a kaleidoscope--constantly changing and each fragment revealing a tiny bit of the story which only becomes whole as the pieces move around their own axes and blend for a moment to become the whole.  To me, it says the war and suffering are only a small part of a long and unfinished story of people who will survive and retain their unique identities despite the foreign cultures which bombard their senses but do not change them."