"The festival’s 2018 edition focused on the theme of Freedom of the Press and Democracy in their representation through cinema, and was supported by a grant from the Global Research Network on Parliaments and People. The research detailed here was conducted over the course of ten days from November 7-16, 2018, by a team of three researchers, and hopes to shed light on the current attitudes and debates that surround the question of freedom of expression during the country’s transition. The three articles in this series will individually examine three of the festival’s programmes, which took place simultaneously in Yangon and provided different approaches to the themes of artistic and journalistic freedom in Myanmar: the Journalism and Culture workshop, a journalistic workshop organized in conjunction with the Myanmar Journalism Institute; the Myanmar Script Fund competition targeting young filmmakers; and a conference gathering various international experts around the topic of Press and Democracy in Myanmar and the Asian continent. In forthcoming contributions, Kimberley Pallenschat will examine the themes and challenges faced by Myanmar’s emerging generation of independent filmmakers, and Theo Stojanov will discuss the proceedings of the Press and Democracy conference. “Is anybody still struggling with their angle?” On Sunday 11th November, the room next to the projection booth at the Waziya Theater was buzzing with questions. With the help of an interpreter, twenty-four young journalism students and their instructors went over the problems that they had encountered in their coverage of the 2018 edition of MEMORY!, a film festival annually held in Myanmar’s former capital city: an interview that fell through, an unsatisfying angle, an issue with a deadline. Throughout the day, the students dispersed around the room, alone or in pairs, working on their stories on the workshop’s computers and occasionally checking Facebook on their phones. As the daily discussion ended, French reporter Carol Isoux reminded the students that the deadline for filing their stories for the workshop’s print publication, Bioscope News, was only a couple of days away, and the class dispersed. From November 5 to 16, 2018 the Waziya Theater, Yangon’s oldest colonial-era cinema, was home to the Myanmar Journalism and Culture initiative (MJC), a joint program now in its second edition, organized as a partnership between MEMORY!, a French organisation headed by Séverine Wemaere and Gilles Duval, and the Myanmar Journalism Institute. Established in Yangon since 2014, MEMORY! International Heritage Film Festival aims to bring to local audiences the international and regional cinema to which the country, despite its rich cinematic history, has had little to no access in recent decades. As well as providing support to emerging local filmmakers through a yearly script competition, the festival’s emphasis also lies in the preservation of Myanmar’s film heritage. The Myanmar Journalism Institute (MJI), founded in 2014, is one of the country’s two independent journalism schools. The MJI trains students in print, online, video, and photo journalism, and most of its graduates go on to work for public and privately-owned media, after a one-year training period that renders them in high demand in a country where journalists often lack formal training. This year’s graduating class, which makes up the workshop’s twenty-four students, is comprised of fourteen women and ten men, ranging from age 17 to 33. As a reflection of the MJI’s efforts towards gender and ethnic inclusion, they come from all over the country, despite Yangon’s expected overrepresentation (only fourteen of the participants originated from the country’s main ethnic group, the Bamar). By encouraging a critical and analytical approach to cinema and the arts that goes beyond entertainment journalism to interrogate the intersections of the arts, politics and society, the MJC hopes to foster a culture of independent reporting, and to mobilize critical engagement with politicians and cultural policies amongst Myanmar’s future reporters. Supervised by French reporters Carol Isoux and Jêrome Boruszewski, local trainers Su Myat Wai and Ko Zayar Min, and Chris Peken, who works with the MJI as a consultant and capacity-builder, the participants spent ten days covering the screenings, events, and themes of the festival. They were able to interview organisers, local and foreign filmmakers, scriptwriters and producers, as well as some government officials. The workshop gave students the opportunity, early on in their curriculum, to immerse themselves in an intensive period of writing and reporting. Individual blog posts are published on a dedicated Facebook page and twelve articles, written in pairs, in an ad hoc publication called Bioscope News – 3,000 copies of which were printed on the final day, assembled by the students, and handed out for free to passers-by and festival-goers. MEMORY!’s 2018 edition was, following the previous year’s focus on Banned Films and Censorship, centered around the theme of Press and Democracy, and on the depiction of reporters on screen – at the confluence of two media (journalism and cinema) whose uneasy and incomplete emergence from a strict regime of state-sanctioned censorship have dominated the recent national and international conversation..."