In a system that denies the existence of basic human rights, fear tends to be the order of the day.
(Aung San Suu Kyi)
Myanmar has a long history of military coups—in 1962, in 1988, and more recently in 2021.
Over the past three years, the army has systematically burned villages, killed and arrested opponents across the country. Young people are forced to move to cities in search of refuge and work in one of the many textile factories.
The film is inspired by women’s strikes that took place in 2012.
Today, women in Burma are still fighting for their rights. Some have joined rebel groups against the military junta.
Mi-Thet is eighteen and comes from the countryside. Like thousands of other young women, she has left her land to work in a textile factory in Yangon. Precarious jobs, irregular wages, daily harassment. The factory is Chinese-owned, but the owners are absent. Control is left to local supervisors who rule through threats.
Life in the factory is not only economic exploitation: it is humiliation, forced silence, fear.
Mi-Thet shares an overcrowded room with two other workers. Food is scarce, rest is a luxury. The workers haven’t been paid in two months. At this point, Nyein-Nyein speaks up. She is the one who proposes the strike. Some hesitate, others back out. But the act breaks a passivity that the economic and military regime relies on maintaining.
Mi-Thet hesitates, then joins in. The workers begin picketing the factory. They demand what is rightfully theirs: wages, respect, to be heard. But power in Myanmar doesn’t listen—it crushes. It does so in factories as it does in the streets, using the same mechanisms that enabled the 2021 coup.
The same invisible hands that fund the textile industry also fuel the junta. The workers are just pawns in an economy of war and exploitation.
Mi-Thet meets U Tun, a marginal, disillusioned man who survived the 1988 uprisings. He is the one who shows her that rights are not granted—they are taken. Through awareness, through struggle.
From that moment on, Mi-Thet returns to the strike with new determination. The workers refuse compromise. They want to speak directly with the owner.
The owner's car approaches. The girls wait.
Moments later, they lie on the ground. Wounded, perhaps dead. In silence.
Another unrecorded execution.
MA – Cry of Silence tells without embellishment what happens every day in Myanmar: a transnational system of exploitation that crushes women’s bodies, silences protest through violence, and hides those responsible behind corporate names and international deals.
Many of the film’s actresses are former factory workers.
This is not a film about reality—it is reality being staged.
There is no distance, no allegory.
Only a political urgency: to make visible what power wants to keep hidden.
The director shows the faces of the oppressed, but not those of the oppressors.
Because in post-coup Myanmar, power wears masks, dissolves, protects itself behind the logic of the global market.
And while the world looks away, women fight—alone if they must, without a future if they must.
But they fight.
Human slavery has reached its peak in our time in the form of freely wage-labored work.
(George Bernard Shaw)
