The Lady and the Burmese Government
Michelle Yeoh stars in Luc Besson’s The Lady (2011) as Aung San Suu Kyi, the first woman in all of Asia to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Suu Kyi is amazing: She is a Burmese woman who started a life in England with her English husband. Suu Kyi returned to Burma to visit her dying mother, saw first hand the army’s repression of the people, and so founded a party to challenge the government and won the election. The government, however, ignore the will of the people, place her under house arrest and ban her husband and children from entering Burma. She was under house arrest for over a decade before her release in 2010 - a large part due to her husband and supporters working vigorously to ensure her legacy and the injustice she was fighting to draw attention to was not forgotten. Luc Besson’s film was in the works at the time of her release.
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