Kalama Sutta

A feature in the Arizona Film Festival's Premiere Showcase, Kalama Sutta: Seeing Is Believing is Holly Fisher's documentary about human rights violations in Burma and the international media's effect on the indigenous peoples' struggles for democracy. Layering interviews, news footage, clips from the internet, and video the filmmaker shot in Burma while posing as a tour operator, Kalama Sutta sustains a deeply affecting tone of sadness and frustration when discussing the atrocities committed against the Burmese by the ruling military dictatorship, but tends to become unfocused when the focus shifts to media critique. In a particularly pointed moment, a Burmese activist asks the audience how one can capture the slow death of an entire people with a camera; in several momentum-stalling moments, Fisher fills the screen with close-ups of a flickering computer monitor, one of the least compelling filmic images yet found. Flawed but amibtious and often heart-wrenching, Kalama Sutta is more notable for its effect on its audience than its technical precision.