Stand Up for Women! Stand Up for Peace! (2018)

Stand Up for Women! Stand Up for Peace! is an animation by Yangon Film School and is sponsored by the Deepening Democracy in Extremely Politically fragile countries: networking for historical, cultural and arts research on Parliaments and people project.

In 2017, the Yangon Film School (YFS) launched a programme of training, mentorships and outreach around ‘Women and Peace in Myanmar’. As part of this, Indian gender-activist Paromita Vohra and award-winning animator Debjani Mukherjee travelled to Yangon where they joined with YFS to train a group of young Burmese students in innovative documentary and animation film techniques.

The aim of the ‘Stand Up for Women! Stand Up for Peace!’ docu-animation film series is to increase understanding of gender-based violence amongst public and policy-making audiences. It challenges the perception of violence against women as a private domestic issue, and situates it instead in the broader social landscape – exploring the intersections and entanglement between gender-based violence on one hand, and conflict, human rights, and precarity on the other. The course participants and subsequent film-makers were encouraged to think about how arts and humanities methodologies such as docu-animation can produce visually powerful narratives in emotionally resonant ways.