Verse: filmmaking for women's rights in Myanmar ^{CEFR B2}

The 2021 coup in Myanmar brought fresh pressure on local media and rights groups. Exile Hub, a Global Voices partner in Southeast Asia, grew from that moment to offer practical support to journalists and human rights defenders. One filmmaker who emerged from this period is known as Verse; she now focuses on human rights and feminist advocacy through film.

Verse began as a reporter in 2018 and wanted to cover political news, but she encountered clear gender bias. On a major assignment, male reporters were sent to Nay Pyi Taw while she was asked to stay behind. That treatment led her to leave journalism and join a women’s rights organisation. Her feminist conviction was rooted in family life: her grandmother, a Rakhine woman who ran a sawmill and worked among men, modelled quiet defiance of restrictive social rules.

Verse studied at Yangon Film School in 2020. When she challenged an inappropriate question about girls’ bodies, the school introduced its first zero-tolerance sexual harassment policy. She now uses film to make often unseen women visible. Her animated film Exit explores the lives of sex workers and addresses stigma, violence and criminalisation. Goethe-Institut Myanmar supported the film and it screened at the Shi Exhibition and the DVB Peacock Film Festival in 2024.

• Critical Voices production grant via Exile Hub in 2022
• Feminist Storytelling Grant in 2025
• Documentary Fight for Freedom follows an exiled woman resisting military patriarchy

Verse lives in Myanmar, cares for her ageing grandmother, and says her guiding belief is that women deserve equality, dignity and the freedom to define their own lives.