Into The Jungle

28 May 2013 | 1:56 pm | Anthony Carew

"It almost became this cautionary tale, on forcing other people into doing something, and the loss of innocence that comes with."

"It all started with a Facebook update,” laughs Juliet Lamont, of the beginnings of her film Miss Nikki & The Tiger Girls. “Nikki's an old friend of mine from the VCA in Melbourne, and I hadn't seen her for years, and she had a status that said 'I just started Myanmar's first girl band'. For me, as a documentary-maker, just that one line had all the dramatic stakes and conflict you could hope for.”

At the time, it was 2010, and Myanmar was still suffering under a military dictatorship. So, when Lamont chose to travel behind the regime's iron curtain to make a film about Nikki May's attempts to assemble a manufactured girl-group amidst a climate of repression and censorship, the undertaking was fraught with challenges and dangers.

“When we went there in 2010, it was just before the first elections in 20 years, so there was a complete ban on any foreign media, particularly anyone with a camera,” Lamont recalls. “We had to pretend we were tourists going on a meditation retreat, that's how we got our tourist visas, and even then you can't stay in the country for too long. We kept filming under-the-radar on a tiny camera that looked like a still camera, then we'd have to leave and come back again. We went six times for about two weeks at a time.”

Putting on her “biggest tourist hat” and “biggest, brightest smile,” Lamont made the film covertly, under some duress. “It was a really challenging, often difficult film to make. Each time we left, we never knew if we'd be let back in. And there was always the feeling that we were going to get our footage taken away. We got pretty good at stashing our hard-drives in our undies on the way out of the country.”

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That sustained ruse strangely mirrored the lives of the film's local subjects: the five girls that May had recruited to be part of the Tiger Girls. Each wears their own biggest, brightest smile, masking the duress of their daily lives. “They couldn't really speak to us for fear of jail,” says Lamont. “I was really naïve, I thought they'd be able to speak to us really openly and directly about their experiences living in a country like that. But because they'd been living under a military regime all their lives, they had a psychological imperative not to tell the truth, because it gets them in trouble. At the beginning of the film, before the country changed, if they'd talked about the fact that their parents made $2 a day at the pork shop, or that the electricity service was fucked and the government was fucked, if they'd been found out they would've gone to prison. So, I had five beautiful girls who really wanted to tell me that they wanted to be famous, but they couldn't actually tell me much more than that.”

Eventually, Lamont decided: “'you can sing, why don't you sing the story?'” And, thus, instead of to-camera confessionals, Miss Nikki & The Tiger Girls has its girl-group subjects singing out their troubles in song form, expressing the feelings with a truthfulness they can't quite speak. “And, from that, it turned into a sort of hybrid musical-documentary.”

Of course, even the fact that the Tiger Girls were writing their own songs —both for the band and for the film— was itself a form of sedition. “They started to do original material really early on, and that was a real cultural no-no,” offers Lamont. The whole music industry —if you can even call it an 'industry'— is pretty much just rip-offs of Western hits that they put their own Burmese lyrics to... Towards the end of the film they wrote a song calling all the exiles to come home and rebuild their country. If they'd written that song in 2010, they would've been jailed.”

After Lamont's debut documentary, The Snowman, was an intensely personal piece exploring family secrets, Miss Nikki & The Tiger Girls became innately political (“it's impossible that this wasn't going to be a political film”) by dint of being filmed in Myanmar, and by chronicling the culture clash between the budding band and their free-spirited mentor. “Nikki really thought she was empowering them by taking them to a sex shop, to exposing them to all this Western music, to encouraging them to being really out there,” Lamont says. “It almost became this cautionary tale, on forcing other people into doing something, and the loss of innocence that comes with.”