Dancing with Dictators 1x57, or 1x80

This is a film about the struggle for control of MCM, the only media company in Burma with any foreign investment. Australian publisher Ross Dunkley started and owns 49% of Burma’s leading newspaper, The Myanmar Times, while a government-mandated partner holds the other 51%. The paper comes out weekly in both Burmese and English and, like all media in the country, it is heavily censored. What sort of journalist owns a newspaper in one of the most repressive countries on earth? Against the background of the country’s first election in 20 years, the film travels inside this closed and frightened society where, following the election, enmity comes to a head—Dunkley is arrested and charged with immigration offenses linked to assaulting a woman and spends seven weeks in Burma’s notorious Insein prison before making bail. After 20 court appearances, Ross Dunkley is now free and plotting how not to be the last foreign publisher in Burma.

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