{"componentChunkName":"component---src-templates-article-js","path":"/lin-htet-aung-art-after-the-myanmar-coup-detat-feature-max-crosbie-jones/","result":{"data":{"wordpressPost":{"id":127885,"slug":"lin-htet-aung-art-after-the-myanmar-coup-detat-feature-max-crosbie-jones","title":"Lin Htet Aung: Art After the Myanmar Coup d’Etat","excerpt":"Lin Htet Aung’s poetic, nonlinear films defy categorisation, confound international audience expectations and won’t be shown in his native Myanmar anytime soon. So what are they about, and who are they for?","content":"\n

Lin Htet Aung’s poetic, nonlinear films defy categorisation, confound international audience expectations and won’t be shown in his native Myanmar anytime soon. So what are they about, and who are they for?

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While the true victims of military dictatorship and deadly civil war in Myanmar are made of flesh and blood, some in the country argue that its film scene has also been gravely wounded – ‘restrained’, as filmmaker Moe Myat May Zarchi puts it, ‘from its freedom to explore, experiment and truly grow wildly’. Prior to the 2021 military coup – a period when the country, led by a civilian government headed by Aung San Suu Kyi, found itself at the cusp of an exciting yet shortlived democratic flourishing – several independent film festivals ‘elevated cinema culture in our country’, she writes, by giving young aspiring filmmakers an opportunity to experiment with low-budget shorts and screen their efforts in the city of Yangon. And yet, she believes, there remains a lack of inventive image-making. The structural reasons put forward for this lack include the strict rote learning of the education system and limited access to new technology, but she also floats a deep seated psychological reason: ‘our witnessing and enduring of decades of painful hardship, which leads to a great focus on powerful stories and less focus on the exploration of cinema form itself’.

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Published in 2023, Moe’s provocative article is borne out anecdotally by the recent evidence of the eyes: powerful stories do reign supreme. When a feature film from Myanmar is lauded these days – Aung Phyoe’s Fruit Gathering (2026), for example, which won top prize at the Czech Republic’s Karlovy Vary film festival in July – this acclaim tends to centre around the weight and perspicuity of the message bound up within the drama, not formal experimentation. And documentaries about the depredations of the civil war and humanitarian situation are regularly screened at international film festivals. In short, films from Myanmar often fall under the banner of art activism or creative resistance, while foreign audiences anticipate direct, tragic realism from a crisis zone.

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Lin Htet Aung, then, is something of an outlier. Since attending a film festival in Yangon in 2017, this self-taught filmmaker has produced a suite of experimental films within which any political, historical or sociological message that the viewer may sense rests upon the pursuit of a slippery, shifting poetic quality, not reality.

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Once Upon a Time, There was a Mom (still), dir. Lin Htet Aung, 2023. Courtesy the artist
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The acclaimed Once Upon a Time There was a Mom (2023) is a silent black-and-white short comprising episodes of mystifying family drama. In its opening scene, a simple midcentury dining room quickly comes to seem ominously charged: a morose man sitting at a dinner table across from his son holds an upturned bowl, near a pile of rice that appears to have just fallen on the floor. A wind then enters the house by brute force. This uninvited presence is Death, we can surmise: the son spots his mother, dressed in traditional attire, lying supine on the floor. In the instant that a sheer floral fabric is laid over her lifeless body, she vanishes.

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What follows is a succession of equally curious vignettes, set to a plaintive soundtrack of piano, folk songs and traditional Burmese instrumentation, in which a cycle repeats: the father, transformed back into his teenage self, falls in love again. Or tries to: the woman he is pursuing has also secured the affections of his son, who tells her, “You look so much like my mom”, as they canoodle in a derelict building. Flecked throughout this slow-burning story are incidental moments heavy with cryptic symbolism, from a duck hopping up a staircase to a rock falling on a vanity mirror and a three-way ritual in which flower petals are eaten in slow motion. Intensifying its spell are a radio broadcast announcing an earthquake and intertitles recounting episodes from the Vessantara Jātaka (the tumultuous story of Buddha’s past life as a virtuous prince who gives away his family).

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This 29-minute film’s archaic syntax, handsome nostalgia and retooling of a Theravada Buddhist tale are offshoots of a protean, magpielike methodology. “I see film styles as found objects,” Lin tells me in Bangkok in August, between completing an art residency in northeast Thailand and returning to Frankfurt, where he is studying at the Städelschule art school. “Like other artists who use found objects, you can see a signature in my works, but the shapes and forms are always changing.”

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A Gentle Breeze (stills), dir. Lin Htet Aung, 2026. Courtesy the artist
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This shapeshifting has given rise to a semiautobiographical story called A Gentle Breeze (2026): a micro-bildungsroman about a boy milling around at home in rural Myanmar. Inspired by the TV dramas Lin grew up watching, it’s a pared-down and quietly confident film in which mundane incidents – his mother’s cooking, broken tree branches hitting the roof, the wind that brings them down – slowly take on a supernatural gravity. The last film he shot in Myanmar, its layers of political subtext are subtle by necessity – a way of protecting both himself and those who collaborated with him. Another striking about-turn, A Metamorphosis (2025), is a gnomic foray into the mise-en-scène of TV studios in Myanmar. With their strong lines, bold colours and harsh lighting, the sets are oppressive, to the extent that they resemble human cages. Accompanying the jerky and grainy images of them are too-cute lo-fi melodies, Burmese lullabies and a ticker relaying bizarre breaking news.

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To the sceptical viewer, Lin’s mercurial approach might suggest a flightiness, a sophomoric lack of focus, but there is always a rationale behind the chopping and changing. Once Upon a Time… was spurred by the fact that only one silent black-and-white movie from Myanmar is known to survive: Tin Maung’s Mya Ga Naing (The Emerald Jungle) (1934). “I tend to see my work as a form of archiving, even if does not use archival materials or documentation,” Lin says. “The idea was to make a second silent black-and-white movie for my country.” In a 2024 interview he described it as ‘a kind of delicate horror story that reflects the complex political power play’ in Myanmar. Similarly, A Metamorphosis arose from a desire to détourne the style of government TV propaganda in pursuit of what the synopsis terms a ‘counter-nightmare’ that ‘resembles the parts that they dare not show’.

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A Metamorphosis (stills), dir. Lin Htet Aung, 2025. Courtesy the artist
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Clearly a fervent political consciousness born of personal experience is at work, yet in conversation Lin baulks at the suggestion that concrete meaning could or should be ascribed. “My films are not about explaining in a straightforward way,” he stresses. “I see them more as doorhandles.”

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Lin’s path into filmmaking presented itself in Yangon, where he arrived from Taungdwingyi, a town in central Myanmar, to study civil engineering at Yangon Technological University. There he attended literature workshops and began writing underground poetry under the pen name Thway Ha. The switch to film came in 2017, after an afternoon at Yangon’s historic Waziya Cinema, where Tsai Ming-Liang films were being showcased as part of the MEMORY! International Film Heritage Festival. By the time the screening finished, Lin had decided to drop poetry and pursue filmmaking that composes time as well as image.

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His first effort, Silence! (2018) – a lo-fi, handheld affair set in a barbershop – looks like it was made by him and his friends for the sole enjoyment of him and his friends. But Lin soon began metabolising the dysfunctional goings-on around him, fashioning shorts that seem, through their polysemic nature and probing of form, to channel the ‘witnessing and enduring of decades of painful hardship’ that Moe wrote about. Yet they do so without, as he says, “using other people’s suffering” and “being obvious”.

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Estate (still), dir. Lin Htet Aung, 2020. Courtesy the artist
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Made at the start of the pandemic, Estate (2020) seems to emulate, through its metallic found sounds, snippets of secondhand conversation and blurred digital graphics, the monotony and confinement of being stuck at home with nothing more than thin walls, noisy neighbours and a phone screen for company. Then came the still-expanding cluster of films archly reacting to another convulsion: the end of democratic rule in 2021. Appropriating an obsolete film genre, the silent actuality film Me and My Country Pornography (2022) is a video diptych in which Lin, dressed in polkadot pyjamas, walks left to right through a home repeatedly. Breaking up the footage are suggestive intertitles: ‘Part 1: Quickie’, ‘Part 2: Foreplay’, ‘Part 4: Edging’, etc.

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As a low-budget experiment in the power of innuendo, it is not entirely successful, but it stands as an attempt to allegorise the cyclicity of sociopolitical trauma in Myanmar – ‘the repetitive act of being screwed’, as one reviewer puts it. And it is also a response, Lin says, to the period after the coup when “international audience and film festival programmers expected to see violent images and political films from our country” (a statement that somewhat colours the synopsis’s talk of ‘people who want to watch a different kind of porn’ and ‘immediately pull down their zipper’).

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The films he has churned out since, including Once Upon a Time… and A Metamorphosis, can be read in a similar fashion, although his own position within Myanmar’s political stalemate – and its historical resonances – have also had an impact on the tenor and direction of his work. Shortly after the coup, students at Yangon Technological University staged a boycott. Four years into a five-year degree, Lin never went back. “Our school has a history of many students not finishing their studies,” he says, alluding to the 1988 protests, or 8888 Uprising, which were triggered after riot police shot a student there. Lin left Myanmar in December 2023 after winning a place at Städelschule, and he has not been home since – for fear of being conscripted into the army (reintroduced in February 2024, Myanmar’s military service law enforces mandatory conscription for men aged eighteen to thirty-five). “It’s not like military service in other countries,” he says. “You have to really kill other people: your people, your friends on the side of the revolution.”

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One outcome of his situation is a cruel irony: once dismissive of the older generation’s fixation on the politics and struggles of their era, Lin now finds himself in a similar boat. Another outcome is a freedom, privilege and opportunity – a chance to ‘truly grow wildly’ – not enjoyed by his friends back home.

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Buried a Dog Called it Love (still), dir. Lin Htet Aung, 2026. © Nowness Asia. Courtesy the artist
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Currently, he is eagerly expanding into art installations and developing the screenplay for his first feature film, although there are downsides to his being abroad. The physical distance from his homeland and the likelihood of not going back for many years has, he says, left him contemplating the sorts of moral and ethical considerations that many diasporic artists eventually confront: “Can I still say something? Am I still in a position to tell Burmese people about Myanmar?” Since the coup, he has not shown any of his films in Myanmar, and such are the risks and burdens faced by those living there that he is not inclined to. “These films are not for them, not for the present day; they are for people looking back in the future,” he says. Were he to make one for Myanmar audiences today it would, he adds, be an entertaining or beautiful film full of comedy or flowers – something peaceful they can enjoy.

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As things stand, the fleeting peace and beauty of Lin’s films help him conjure a miasma of discomfort. Made in Thailand with Thai actors, Buried a Dog Called it Love (2026) is a sumptuous film groaning with delectable imagery: coconuts falling, women powdering their faces, crockery, ice cream, fresh flowers. But its luscious backdrops and decadent things are merely props in a small-town drama, set in socialist 1970s Myanmar, wherein preparations for a politician’s visit quickly take on an uncanny, nightmarish quality: the shot of coconuts is held long enough to unsettle, the women are gossiping about a child who was mauled to death by a dog, the crockery being carried is wobbling, the bowls of ice cream melting and someone just sprayed the fresh flowers with perfume. Taking place against heavy curtains and sagging national flags, the events the actors (and pretty props) animate, like players in a flowing tableau vivant, become increasingly dizzying and inexplicable. Lin, perhaps, is trying to relate the everyday havoc and absurdism of life under the late General Ne Win, a superstitious leader who relied on soothsayers, astrologers, numerology and yadaya (traditional ritual magic) to make state decisions. But as with all his films, coming to this – or any – conclusion, finding a powerful story hidden within the adopted form, requires a closure: a filling in of blanks.

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From the Autumn 2026 issue of ArtReview Asia – get your copy.

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Read next How Thailand Became a Refuge for Displaced Myanmar Creatives

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