It is hard to feel at all optimistic after this quiet meditation on the situation in Myanmar at the moment.

In one of those happy accidents of MIFF, I sat next to a white haired older couple, said an obligatory good morning as I sat down but didn’t feel like they particularly wanted to engage. I thought it was a bit odd that the husband left 15 minutes before the end of the film, I heard him say something about ‘I’m feeling uncomfortable’ and I just assumed it was the seats perhaps.

The film is about the situation in Myanmar at the moment told through the eyes of female textile workers. It’s fictionalised but is intercut with real footage of villages being burned down, showing people being displaced from rural villages into cities and living in poverty. They have to work at jobs like this one at a textile factory making black puffer jackets, beaten by the overseer and not paid for months.

We also see a character who survived the 1988 democracy uprising, where the people united against the military junta and overthrew it. Not without loss though, this man still bears the scars.

As the end credits rolled, my seat neighbour turned to me and said, “it’s so hard watching this because we were there for the 1988 uprising and my husband couldn’t bear to watch it.” We chatted a bit, and she told me how difficult it was at the time. Everyone thought that this was a change for the better, the military were gunning down students and the people united to bring an end to it. She said though that nothing has changed, and now there is an uprising again but there are factions and no united front. It is a country of separate cultural groups and the future looks bleak.

I think we can tell in this fictionalised account that the future is bleak for these women. One of them, Ma (Nay Htoo Aung), knows that they need to stand up against their bosses and demand their pay. She leads a strike of a portion of the women at the factory, and they are resolute even though they are threatened, risk being evicted from their shanty accommodation, and can’t send money back to family members in the country who are worse off.

Director The Maw Niang and South Korean writer Oh Young Jeong give us a quiet and sometimes stilted/stitched together series of vignettes of the story. It works in a way as it immerses us in different scenes, following the women and the choices they make or have to make. For one it is not paying her rent so she can send money back to her younger sister who is trying to survive after both parents have disappeared. For another it is having sex with the overseer so that she gets extra money and privileges.

There is no real judgement, just a deep sorrow at the helpless situation they are in. There is a strong message about the strength of women and the strength of people who refuse to accept tyranny. We are given no reprieve though, and I can see why my seat neighbour couldn’t stay to watch the end.