The Bamboo Family 

Myanmar | Film 75min, TV 45min | 2K HD | Color

Logline

A Burmese documentary filmmaker living in Paris hides his true life from his family in Myanmar.

Synopsis

Facing growing resistance from his family, a filmmaker runs away from Myanmar and moves to Paris to pursue filmmaking. There, he revisits his family past while navigating an existential crisis and the guilt of leaving his family behind.

Director's Statement

This film is born from the silence I’ve carried for decades, a silence inherited from my father and enforced by a regime that made truth dangerous. The Bamboo Family is an intimate documentary about the emotional cost of repression on family, identity, and love. I grew up in Myanmar, son of a political prisoner and a mother with cancer. Queer, abused, bullied, ashamed, I learned to hide; we spoke neither politics nor feelings. My father erased his prison years, and I never told him what I endured. This film breaks that silence, confronting him to say: This is who I am. Now exiled in Paris, I navigate two selves: filmmaker seeking to be seen and refugee trying to stay safe. Rejections, visas, and funding delays breed doubt, yet I persist. Among exiled artists from Iran, Ukraine, and Africa, I see exile as a quest for identity art is our language and shield. The Bamboo Family shows how fear travels across generations, how silence fractures us, and how cinema, truth, and love can heal.

Director Sein Lyan TUN

Producer Ken-ichi IMAMURA