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The Documentary: Yangon Renaissance: Poets, Punks and Painters

'No U Turn' band

26/07/2017 GMT

Yangon Renaissance: Poets, Punks and Painters

BBC World Service - The Documentary, Yangon Renaissance: Poets, Punks and Painters

Inside Yangon as revealed through the artists, writers and musicians hoping for change

A revealing window onto Myanmar as seen through the eyes of Yangon’s young artists, writers and musicians.

After decades suppressed by Myanmar’s military junta, we go inside Yangon's booming counter-cultural art scene to reveal the city as seen through the eyes of the young artists on the frontline of change.
 
Until censorship was lifted in 2012, dissident artists, musicians and poets lived with the threat of jail for speaking out against the military regime that had gripped Myanmar, or Burma, since 1962 and turned it into a police state. Now, from modern art to punk rock to poetry, a new vibrant youth culture is flourishing - inconceivable only five years ago, when there was no internet, no mobile phones, no freedom of expression. Recorded on location, we meet the emerging artists and performers breaking through and forging a new Myanmar. 
 
It is a critical juncture in the country’s history, but the rules are still unclear. How open can they be? Work by former political prisoners is now on show, and even the country's former spymaster has turned his house into a gallery. But we hear from a young poet who was imprisoned for six months for a six-line poem seen to insult the president just last year. Under Aung San Suu Kyi’s government, prosecutions under the notorious 66D defamation clause, seen by critics as a weapon to silence anyone speaking out against the state, have risen sharply. And so old habits of self-censorship are hard to break. But are young artists optimistic about their country’s future?

(Photo: The band No U Turn who feature in the programme. Credit: Nico Djavanshir)

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