A Robbie Fowler Experience

 
2001: for lovers of football (the world game) … It might seem like a challenge to get a production camera, sound recording equipment and 40 blank tapes into military run Burma but not so, not when Robbie Fowler is on your side? So, we’re watching the Liverpool vs Arsenal FA Cup final in Bangkok the night before I am due to fly into Burma. Pints downed, Liverpool wins and the 2:00am raffle takes place. I get the 8th and final- prize, a large and artistically challenged sculpture of Robbie Fowler. He looks like Action man in Liverpool kit. Muscles bulge. Ugly. The next day, as stomachs contort at the prospect of the impending trip into Burma, an idea forms. I take the bottom out of my camera bag and lay it over the top of the equipment. Sneaky. Then I place Robbie Fowler such that he will be staring up at anyone who opens the bag. Zip up the bag. On the plane, off the plane, hope like heck that Rangoon customs waves you past. They don’t. So hope they open any bag but the camera bag. They don’t. And then, staring straight back at these suspicious uniform clad officials is Robbie, ready and willing. ‘Freakish bloody foreigners,’ they think in unison as they close the Robbie bag back up and let me pass. And meanwhile my stomach dives off the 10 metre platform, helter-skelters through the air before making an almost dignified entry into the pool below.

 

Director’s Annecdote

 
Taking a light approach to a heavy subject, filming a feature documentary in central Burma with less than discreet equipment is like walking around a police convention with a bag of marijuana strapped to your head. And when filming is invariably, and quite rudely, curtailed, post-production becomes a process somewhat akin to sitting down with a jigsaw puzzle with little idea of what the picture could, or should, look like. A challenging project, certainly, so why persist for more than 9 years? Bloody mindedness? Yes. Because of the beauty and the pain of Burma and its people? Also yes. And something else? Inevitability, fate, or something equally esoteric? Yes, perhaps something like that, or at the very least a strange series of circumstances that have led to the telling of this particular story in this particular way.