After the passing away of their mother, two brothers visit their ex-soldier father for the first time. They carry a jar of sea water and stalks of corn to try and make him remember his dark past. When he was in the Air Force, he raped their mother while the army was raping and plundering the homes of the Karen minority.
For the majority of its brief runtime, Kaung Myat Thu Kyaw's “Burn Boys” is an enigma. Why do the brothers carry these random things? Do they mean something or they're included to make the movie weird and “artsy”? Are they in some way connected with the Karen twins Johnny and Luther Htoo? Are they there to let us think about them or simply to make the short more surreal? Or about the conflicts at the end of the 90s, and as such, make us piece together what group they belong to and what people their father comes from? How their parents met? The strange aesthetic employed by the director doesn't help us reach any answers. The opposite. The odd, but always pleasant choices he makes for the presentation of the film make it all the more difficult to grasp.
Visually, there is almost every technique one could think of – slow motion, severely over- and underexposed shots, grainy and digital-looking ones, even some special effects towards the end. All of that results not in a kitschy mess, but in a pleasing hodgepodge, largely due to the adequate cinematography by Thu Ya Aung and Yupa Mo Mo. This also makes it a tiring experience, especially for an eleven minute film, mainly because of the visual assault that some scenes present.
The acting is pretty surreal too. The actions of the two men who play the brothers are almost perfectly synchronic. They move as one, speak as one, their clothes are also almost the same. It's a bit weird to look at, but works very well within the strange world created by the movie. Only at the climax does the magical sync between them break and the two start acting separately.
Aurally, “Burn Boys” is pretty weird too. The sound of some scenes is severely out of sync, while others are deafeningly silent. Rather than a fluke or editing mistake by Kaung Myat Thu Kyaw, it seems to be done on purpose. This all elevates the feeling that the characters are not normal and they inhabit a world that isn't either. In a sense, the two brothers can be taken as ghosts, or maybe possessed by their Karen ancestors to enact vengeance on their Burmese oppressors. And enacting vengeance they do, not through physical violence, like the Burmese do, but through making them remember what they have done in the past. And this is much more powerful, because it forces them to live with the savage acts they have been committing for the past seven decades.
