Our Burmese Days

This is a documentary about a family with origins from Burma (now Myanmar) and of their journey to trace their roots. The entire documentary focuses on the mothers’ (Sally) denial of her ties and heritage to Burma as she claimed to be from Hemel Hempstead in the United Kingdom. Her daughter Lindsey filmed and interviewed her mother and uncle, Bill, most of the time trying to uncover why her mother persistently couldn’t admit that she was not British but rather Burmese. They embarked on an emotional journey back to Burma after at least 2 decades of living in England to discover that their matriarch (Sally and Billy’s mother) was long dead and most likely passed away of starvation and that the conditions to which they left the country was almost exactly the same after all these years. While Bill quickly embraced his past and one can even say found some sort of peace, reconciliation and solitude in returning home, Sally expressed contempt, displeasure and uneasiness in being at the place where she spent most of her youth. She occasionally showed genuine nostalgic emotion but she kept trying to convince herself and her daughter that she and all her family are superior to the people they had left behind, holding contempt towards her mother for not putting the maids and the servants “in their place”. Sally never did admit to being a Burmese, but from her reaction to stories told, one can insinuate that she empathised with the mixed race individuals or “Half-caste” as they referred to themselves as, who experienced some level of discrimination from the pure race individuals. That even though she did not seemed to be of mixed race, her class in that society by her parents status and association made it difficult for them to fit in properly.

The journey through their roots lead them to discover some secrets about themselves and their family, including a sexual relationship that was shared with a maid by both Bill and their (Sally and Bill’s) father and also embracing their late mother’s lover. Some might find understanding in Sally dissociation with her roots while others might find her having simply built a superiority complex towards her people and the most logical of them all, in my opinion, is an abuse she must have experienced that scarred her while she was there in her youth to which she is still not willing to share or admit.