Happy World – Burma : the dictatorship of the absurd

Copyright © www.happy-world.com

There is much to say about HAPPY WORLD, the “hypervideo experience” by Tristan Mendès-France and Gaël Bordier, produced by Cinquième Etage Production and Upian. At first, they had the idea of shooting a clandestine documentary in Burma (because journalists are not allowed there) about people’s daily life and the absurdity of this dictatorship, Burma being known to remain one of the most inaccessible country in the world today. The project sounds immediately exciting, because images from Burma are rare, except for its official propaganda. Nevertheless no French television channels did support or bought the film project. Still, the authors came back from “Myanmar” with a 30 minutes documentary.

This is when comes to their mind the idea of using the web to broadcast their documentary. Film production company Cinquième Etage worked with Web agency Upian to conceive an original way to add features to the documentary, design a new and original experience, and spread it on the web. Three key ideas characterize this interesting new way of broadcasting documentary online :

1. The film is freely “embeddable” : one can broadcast it on any site or any platform. The purpose is to reach a bigger audience. This approach takes the very opposite course of recent French law “Hadopi” which allegedly “protects” authors from illegal copying. HAPPY WORLD is offered to viewers with a Creative Commons licence, making them “free to share, copy, broadcast and transmit this content”. The aim is also to show TV channels that this documentary reaches an audience and that it is worth financing a longer TV version. But, above all, as Upian director Alexandre Brachet explains it in this Webdocu.fr video, it is mainly about a philosophy of the web, dating from Internet early years, where one could show anything anywhere. Back then, this freedom spirit and sharing philosophy produced the richness and interest of the web. About business model ? There should be as many as there are web projects, Alexandre Brachet says.
2. With this same open state of mind, the web tool chosen to design HAPPY WORLD is the HTML5 Popcorn.js framework. This opensource tool was developed by Mozilla Web Made Movies contributive community. We pretty much appreciated this whole coherent approach ☺
3. Popcorn.js, indeed. Even before it was released, in various blogs HAPPY WORLD was presented as a webdocumentary. True… in the sense that it is designed for the web and broadcasted online, but unlike “usual” webdocumentaries, the interactivity for the user here is quite different, and not as advanced. Instead of “webdoc” or “idoc” (interactive documentary), it would be more accurate to define HAPPY WORLD as a “hypermedia” or “hypervideo” (as it is presented on its site). The main content, the documentary, is linear and uniform. The user doesn’t have possibilities to click, choose, interact with it or with the narration. Here, the multimedia elements are featured in a separated window located on the right of the video player. You can consult them, or not, while watching the documentary. By clicking them, the film is set to pause and you will access the “rich media” dimension of HAPPY WORLD : plenty of articles from Le Monde and Courrier International (therefore partners of the project), some talks from Burmese people (audio files), a brilliant infography of Burma’s strange new capital and a very extensive interactive map of Burma’s junta political opponents, designed by Owni. Rather than a webdocumentary, it seems more of an “augmented” film because of these “bonus”, which are presented as such. Just like good old DVD bonus. From my own “experience” of HAPPY WORLD, I was so captivated by the film that I didn’t give a single look at the extra-features during the film but afterwards. Maybe I’m too old school… Many users probably navigate constantly between the documentary and its rich media. Still, this framework gives freedom to the viewer in the way to deal with contents. This is what characterizes the famous Popcorn.js. It is a mainstream hypermedia tool, here not as elaborated as Lignes de temps of the French Institute of Research and Inovation (IRI) or the historic frescoes of French National Audiovisual Institute (INA).

HAPPY WORLD goes further into this collaborative enrichment approach as the viewers are invited to submit links or their own contents about Burma, if related to the film’s themes. These contents will become part of the extra-features.

Let’s talk a little bit about the documentary, it is still the main content of this project ! At first viewers might be a little surprised and sceptical about the humoristic and playful tone of the film. A strange approach to treat of a fierce dictatorship which has been killing, sending to jail, censoring, brainwashing and impoverishing the Burmese people for nearly half a century now. One could even feel a bit embarrassed because of the “adventures of Tintin ” look of the reporter in the first sequences. As well as the funny little cartoons, which are very “cool”, maybe a bit too much to think of Burma seriously… But rapidly this ironic treatment becomes very relevant. Impertinence and sarcasm only reveal the ridiculous and absurd regime of the junta. The film is divided in short chapters, each one dealing with aspects of Burmese’s daily life (money, phone, driving…). The demonstration is implacable, and you get to laugh (sarcastically).

It may seem to you that the documentary does not go further enough into some themes, or that the reporter has limited relationships with the people. This is of course due to the shooting conditions. The authors had to pretend they were tourists because foreign journalists are not allowed in Burma. So they to had to look like they were just shooting a holiday video with a cheap family camcorder. It is very interesting to listen to the director Gaël Bordier in the making-of video (on HAPPY WORLD site) explaining how he discretely tried as much as possible to frame Tristan Mendès-France in wide shots in order to show the setting around him. Because Burma’s setting is so rarely shown as a pure documentary raw material. Indeed it is so rarely shown at all… In the end, you want to see more of it and you can’t wait to watch a longer version on TV… or online !

Last but not least, the Twitter communication campaign is brilliant, with the censorship animations of users accounts. A smart way to give visibility to HAPPY WORLD which, like Movements.org says, should not distract you from watching the documentary and the extra-features !