Review of Lisa DiLillo's Tongues don't have Bones -- featuring poetry by Kyi May Kaung in Shout Magazine

DOCUMENTARY WORK:





Tongues Don’t Have Bones: A Journey into Burma (30:00) 2001
Videomaker Lisa DiLillo's documentary, “Tongues Don¹t Have Bones”, tells of Burma in the throes of a long-running stranglehold courtesy of one brutal military regime. “Tongues” sounds no blaring wake-up call. It's not by-the-book, not on-the nose. Instead, DiLillo works with a specific pool of key words and images, letting them flow, collide and even tear at one another to reveal tumult in a nation under siege.

To get at what's real, “Tongues” focuses on that which can't be subjugated. Social indictments sprout from the small, personal anecdotes of student leaders. The savaging of national character unfolds in the words of noted poet Kyi May Kaung, now a producer with Radio Free Asia. The horrors of “freedom lost” find voice in Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel Peace Prize winner and repeated recipient of Burmese house arrest. Yet most irrepressible are “Tongues” images of Burmese rivers. The water providing life is the same water choked with the blood of civilian casualties, water that DiLillo uses as a constant mirror of all the regime would like hidden. --by Art Jones, Shout Magazine