Barbet Schroeder’s latest documentary “The Venerable W.” premiered at the New York Film Festival last week.
The film follows an Islamophobic Burmese monk known as The Venerable Wirathu, who has led hundreds of thousands of his Buddhist followers in a hate-fueled, violent campaign of ethnic cleansing.The week, the crisis escalated. OCHA reported, “As of 13 October, some 536,000 Rohingya refugees had fled across the border from Myanmar to Bangladesh since 25 August. Thousands more reportedly remain stranded and in peril in Myanmar without the means to cross the border into Bangladesh. Redfugees arriving in Bangladesh—mostly women and children—are traumatized, and some have arrived with injuries caused by gunshots, shrapnel, fire and landmines.”
On how he came to direct the project, Schroeder shared, “I don’t use director. I use recorder. I had the idea because I read about genocide that was going to happen with the Rohingyas. I read that some Buddhist monks were involved. Since I had done already two documentaries about personification of evil [General Idi Amin Dada (1974) and Terror’s Advocate (2007)] , I was led to think that maybe this could be the third of that trilogy. That’s why I started studying in detail the character and the situation in the country. At the time, it was a possible genocide that was going to happen in the future. In the last few weeks, we know now that is actually in progress and that no one is able to stop it. It becomes frightfully timely. I don’t like to be right on that story, but I’m afraid this is what’s happening.”
When asked what is being done to assist the refugees, he shared, “You can’t go there, so what can you do if you can’t go? The United Nations cannot set foot in the places where all this is happening. They can only talk to the refugees. It’s totally horrendous situation. When you read in The New York Times today what is happening there, you see that this is the most awful things that you have read about it any genocide in the past. It is really, totally horrifying.”
