Laundry is a seemingly mundane family chore, however for 23-year-old filmmaker Kyaw Shoon Le Yee, it represents far more. Le Yee, who hails from Myanmar and spent her childhood in Singapore after shifting right here on the age of three, grew up surrounded by the Burmese perception that girls’s garments are thought-about unclean
It’s to an extent that freshly washed ladies’s garments can’t be hung along with clothes of their male counterparts, and must be dried out of sight.
“Yearly, my household would return to Myanmar to go to through the December holidays the place I must hand wash my pants, skirts, and undergarments (any clothes under the waist) and grasp them on the again balcony of the home, away from the general public’s eye,” she recollects.
“The housing infrastructure shouldn’t be designed within the most secure method, and after I was 14, I nearly slipped and fell out of the balcony whereas attempting to hold my garments out to dry. That was when it hit me – I nearly misplaced my life conforming to this perception that girls’s backside garments should be hung away from the general public eye. Is it value dropping a life over this? I requested my grandma about this perception, and she or he mentioned that it’s simply the best way it has been for 1000’s of years; traditions are to be revered.”
I nearly misplaced my life conforming to this perception that girls’s backside garments should be hung away from the general public eye.
Kyaw Shoon Le Yee
Hoping to deal with this societal expectation of ladies and tackle this decades-old observe of feminine oppression, the younger filmmaker determined to make a brief movie on the subject for her last yr venture in her film-making diploma on the Nanyang Technological College’s Faculty of Artwork, Design and Media.
Titled Soiled Laundry, the brief movie is written and directed by Le Yee. Described as “a easy story about womanhood, pressured conformity and cultural misogyny”, the movie is shot within the Myanmar language, and centres round a teen who disagrees along with her dad and mom on how freshly washed ladies’s garments shouldn’t be hung above males’s garments whereas drying out within the open.
“My intention for this movie is for girls to narrate to and discover consolation on this shared collective expertise of womanhood, as a result of in any case, if we strip away the laundry facet, the core message is relevant to many circumstances,” she asserts. “I additionally need to empower the viewers to face up for his or her beliefs and inform them that whereas it might be exhausting to alter traditions, we are able to nonetheless attempt to negotiate our manner round it. Solely by then will we be capable to slowly have an effect on change.”
I additionally need to empower the viewers to face up for his or her beliefs and inform them that whereas it might be exhausting to alter traditions, we are able to nonetheless attempt to negotiate our manner round it.
Kyaw Shoon Le Yee
With its compelling and thought-provoking narrative that rigorously sheds gentle on this cultural battle, Soiled Laundry made an impressionable influence on the judges at this yr’s Nationwide Youth Movie Awards (NYFA) – a lot in order that it clinched three awards: Greatest Dwell Motion, Greatest Director and Greatest Screenplay within the Pupil class.
The movie was additionally a finalist on the twenty fourth Seoul Worldwide Girls’s Movie Competition (SIWFF).
“Filmmaking is hard. It eats up nearly each ounce of my soul telling such a private story and naturally, as graduating college students, we are sometimes left questioning if we should always pursue this path,” says Le Yee, on her spectacular achievements for a movie that started off as a final-year faculty venture. “These awards and nominations have been like a vote of confidence for myself and my staff – that we’re heading in the right direction, and that we should always persevere on this filmmaking journey.”
Right here, Le Yee shares extra about her ardour for filmmaking, her ideas on this conventional Burmese perception, and the way she reacted when she first heard the information of her nominations and awards.
Supply: Her World
