Burmese director The Maw Naing brings his second solo feature-length effort – after the Myanmarese-Czech co-production The Monk (2014), which premiered at Karlovy Vary – to Marrakech’s Competition strand for its MENA premiere. MA – Cry of Silence is a brief but emotionally charged exploration of the intersecting struggles of class conflict and human rights in the country, inspired by the nation’s women-led factory protests in 2012. With a screenplay by Oh Young Jeong, the film world-premiered at the Busan International Film Festival in October, winning one of two ex-aequo New Currents Awards in the strand reserved for films by Asian directors.

In the wake of the February 2021 coup d’état in Myanmar, 18-year-old Burmese woman Mi-Thet (Su Lay) is a garment factory worker in Yangon trying to make ends meet under the oversight of a threatening supervisor. However, the mysterious and absent Chinese factory boss has not paid the women their wages for two months. Sharing an extremely dark, cramped living space with several other workers, the bold Nyein-Nyein (Kyawt Kay Khaing) decides to instigate a strike, which several of them gladly join, while others are not so willing to put their jobs on the line. Mi-Thet also forms a friendship with an older man called Maung (Nay Htoo Aung), who keeps the young woman aware of the country’s history and how it seems to be repeating itself with the violent military junta.

Notably, the film includes mobile-phone and other low-quality video footage of the rural areas in flames and in ruin, placing Mi-Thet’s plight well within the constraints of the regime’s brutal hand. Several of the main actresses playing factory employees are also, in fact, former garment factory workers. This further blurs the line between fact and fiction in a film that ultimately aims to dramatise a series of events that could very well have happened just as we see them.

For the group scenes, the filmmaker and cinematographer Tin Wing Naing draw on the visual semiotics and aesthetics of a history of protest films originating from South and Southeast Asia. The young women tie on red bandanas, while he shoots them close up and in tight rows as they place their fists up and chant in protest. Conversely, the oppressor is both tangible but abstract: the men in charge are obscured or their faces are hardly ever shown at all, making them a menace that, in many ways, can’t even be fully identified.

Larger geopolitical forces are also alluded to but are left up to the imagination over this film’s brief running time. When garment factories in Myanmar are owned from a distance by foreign businessmen, the country becomes a blank slate for the exploitative business desires of others. The final shots of MA – Cry of Silence don’t tint the situation through rose-coloured glasses, but The Maw Naing suggests that the fight must, and will, still go on.

MA – Cry of Silence was co-produced by Myanmar's One Point Zero, South Korea’s Plus Point One, Singapore’s Potocol, France’s Alpha Violet Production and Massala Production, and Norway's DUOfilm. Alpha Violet has the rights to its world sales.