Though this year’s list of Academy Award-nominated documentaries is one of the strongest they’ve had in years, I’m hoping to see the award for feature-length documentary go to Burma VJ: Reporting From a Closed Country (along with the short doc category award going to my good friends Steve Bognar and Julia Reichert for their film The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant).

Burma VJ is a tremendously effective and important film about citizen media activists in Burma and the extraordinary risks they take to document government repression. The insights and lessons it provides for exposing not just the violent oppression of the military regime in Burma, but the influential power that grassroots, citizen-based media activism can have in confronting such oppression on the national and international political stage in the defense of human rights is transformative.

The video journalists and individual activists whose work is featured in this film took great personal risks to get this story out to the world. A number of them are currently incarcerated as a result of their roles in the Saffron Revolution. Some have been arrested and imprisoned by the government to lengthy sentences.

Please help the effort to free them by Signing The Petition To Free The Burma VJ Political Prisoners.

Watch a feature news story and interview with the film’s producers on Democracy Now!).

Watch an Interview with Burma VJ director Anders Østergaard and Khin Maung Win, Deputy Director of the Democratic Voice of Burma.