Sittwe Film Screening & Panel Discussion About Rakhine State, Burma

Monday, November 6, 2017
6:00 PM - 7:30 PM
(Pacific)

Pigott Hall 113, Building 260, 450 Serra Mall, Stanford

Sittwe gives voice to two teenagers separated by conflict and segregation in Burma’s Rakhine state, Phyu Phyu Than, a Rohingya girl and Aung San Myint, a Buddhist boy. Filmed over two years, the youth share their ideas about mutual fear between their communities and the hope of reconciliation.

Sittwe was produced with the Burmese NGO, Smile Education and Development Foundation as a tool for facilitated discussions about peace building in Burma. The film premiered at the Freedom Film Festival in Malaysia where it was awarded the Best Southeast Asia Short Documentary. 

Please join us for the film screening of this short documentary (running time 20 minutes), followed by a panel discussion with Director Jeanne Hallacy, Producer U Myo Win, Sr. Fellow Larry Diamond, and Dr. Clayborne Carson. 

Panelists:

Jeanne Hallacy, Director of Sittwe, has lived in Southeast for decades producing stories about human rights and social justice issues. Her award-winning documentary films are used as agents for change. Her film titles This Kind of Love, Into the Current: Burma’s Political Prisoners, Mercy (meddah) and Burma Diary are distributed by Kanopy and Documentary Educational Resources. Hallacy directs the InSIGHT OUT! Photo Storytelling project training youth living in conflict and post-disaster areas in photography and digital media.

U Myo Win, Producer of Sittwe, is the Director of Smile Education and Development Foundation in Rangoon founded in 2007 in response to rising intolerance and discrimination in Burma. Smile promotes interfaith harmony, religious freedom, peace building and conflict resolution and advocated for legal reform including the Inter-Faith Harmony Bill focused on religious freedom, and combating hate speech and hate crime. U Myo Win is trained in psychological first aid, and has worked extensively on trauma healing and mental health post-disaster. U Myo Win received a degree in Islamic theology and in 2004 completed a graduate degree in psychology from the University of East Yangon.

Dr. Clayborne Carson has devoted most of his professional life to the study of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the movements King inspired. Since receiving his doctorate from UCLA in 1975, Dr. Carson has taught at Stanford University, where he is now Martin Luther King, Jr., Centennial Professor of History and Ronnie Lott Founding Director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute. 

Larry Diamond is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. For more than six years, he directed FSI’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law, and he continues to lead its programs on Arab Reform and Democracy and Democracy in Taiwan. He is the founding co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and also serves as Senior Consultant at the International Forum for Democratic Studies of the National Endowment for Democracy. His sixth and most recent book, In Search of Democracy (Routledge, 2016), explores the challenges confronting democracy and democracy promotion, gathering together three decades of his work on democratic development, particularly in Africa and Asia.  He has also edited or co-edited more than 40 books on democratic development around the world.

 

This event is co-sponored by CDDRL and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute.

 

Sittwe film poster