Well this is all happening quick! Last week came the surprise news that Luc Besson was already partway through filming a movie starring Michelle Yeoh as Nobel Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, and now the first images from the film have arrived, via The Guardian. You can see the images above and below.
The film, which Variety erroneously said would be called Into the Light but is actually called the Lady, was cloaked in secrecy, partly because Aung San Suu Kyi was still in prison when it started shooting and no one wanted to cause tensions about her release while the movie was shooting in Asia. However now production has moved to London and France, and with news about the film having escaped (partly due to Yeoh going to visit Aung San Suu Kyi), the filmmakers are opening up about it.
Although Aung San Suu Kyi is famed for having spent 15 of the last 20 years under house arrest due to the miltary rulers of Burma not taking kindly to her pro-democracy campaigning, the movie will focus on the years between 1988 and 1999. During this time she returned from Oxford to Burma to visit her sick mother, but decided to stay and fight for democracy, leaving her husband, Michael Aris, behind in England after he was refused entry to Burma.
The film will follow her valiant struggle, which involved her opposition party winning an election but then not being allowed to take office by the military junta that runs Burma, as well as being under house arrest for decades for very dubious reasons. The Lady will build up to the point when her husband was diagnosed with terminal cancer. It’s believed that at that point, Burma’s leaders offered her the chance to leave the country, but if she did, she’d never be allowed to return and continue her fight.
Besson says, “It is the fight of a woman without any weapons, just her kindness and her mentality. She is very Gandhi like. She says we should have the right to decide our future, we should have the right to express ourselves. She is asking for things we all have and don’t even think about any more. How often in history do you have a person, a woman, who never curses, never steals anything, never does anything illegal and you put her under house arrest for 24 years, it is just insane.”
The film really does seem to be a labor of love, and it’s worth reasing the full Guardian story to find out more about the struggle to make it.
