Myanmar: Tough love in a time of strife

Daniel Nelson

“Stop cuddling that smelly baby! She’s sick.”

Hla has a tough love approach to midwifery.

A Buddhist, she unusually is working with and teaching a Muslim colleague, Nyo Nyo. Her tough love extends to her protege. “No matter how much I teach her, she’ll always be just another kalar (darkie) woman.”

Midwife is a documentary, five years in the making, about the two women’s lives in western Myanmar’s Rakhine state. 

It’s a difficult time, with Buddhist marches demanding the death of Muslims, bomb explosions, clashes between the Burmese army and Rohingya militias and religious intolerance: “I don’t let Nyo Nyo treat Muslim patients. If I let a Muslim girl treat Buddhists, people would complain.”

Nyo  Nyo once travelled around the area to check on pregnancies. Now it’s too dangerous.

Politics and prejudice provide the backdrop, but the film focuses on the women's relationship and on Nyo Nyo.

A part of her wants to go to the capital to stay with her sister, wear nice clothes, look good and  enjoy the bright lights. Another part wants to ply her trade and open her own clinic.

But she becomes pregnant. She gets the daughter she wanted, after two sons, but her dream of Yangon vanishes. She has to make the most of her village circumstances - which she does by “borrowing” from the women’s savings group set up by an NGO which has temporarily stopped visiting because of the security risk.

Her husband contributes by using their rice paddy to obtain a loan. The details of these arrangements are unclear, as are other elements of the women’s lives, perhaps because the filmmaker feels the need to keep the story simple.

The film’s strength is in the observational insights and snatches of conversation it captures, building a sometimes intimate picture of the way the women’s lives are inextricably interwoven. The sharp-tongued Hlu casts doubts on Nyo Nyo’s commitment and lack of a “pure heart”, but says she is proud and thrilled when her clinic opens - though still critical of the way Nyo organises it.

The film is an amazing glimpse of how a lucky few can survive in a time and area of vicious conflict.

+ Midwives is showing at the Curzon Bloomsbury on 30 September and 1 October 2022