SYDNEY FILM FESTIVAL: Though one of their number can’t explain the meaning of girl power, the five Burmese teenagers who make up the singing group Tiger Girls (later redubbed Me N Ma Girls—get it?), in cahoots with their committed Melbourne-born entertainer-turned-coach Nikki May, display it in spades by the end of the exquisitely timed Miss Nikki and the Tiger Girls. Putting a unique human face on the recent political upheaval in Myanmar, that most repressive of regimes, this was easily amongst the best of the 10 films in the recently-concluded Sydney Film Festival’s non-fiction competition and is sure to be a hit on the film festival touring circuit.
sure to be a hit on the film festival touring circuit
In partnership with a tough-as-nails Burmese entrepreneur who only has eyes for the bottom line, May begins forging the girls into a tight performance unit ('I know this is going to be difficult without any electricity," Nikki tells them as the lights go out at the beginning of one rehearsal). In and of itself, this isn’t easy: Wai Hnin is susceptible to panic attacks and is tone deaf, whilst Htike Htike isn’t the most natural or graceful of dancers. For her part, Ah Moon is a bit of a control freak and the general consensus is that Kimmy has the best voice—though everyone thinks she’s lacking in the looks department. Finally, Cha Cha has to juggle her work in the band with the disciplinarian military father waiting at home.
Meanwhile, the winds of change are swirling around them. The iron fist of the dictatorship is loosening its grip, and as the group record and release their first record, bankrolled entirely by Nikki and her well-to-do boyfriend Chris, Aung San Suu is released from house arrest and subsequently elected. So the emancipation and organisation of the Tiger Girls is a microcosm for what Burma itself is going through at the same time.
Timing is of course everything in documentary film, yet writer-director Juliet Lamont isn’t content to simply let the galvanising story play out on its own. In an audacious bit of genre grafting first on display not five minutes in to the film, each of the girls has written a song explaining their feelings that they and the others lip-sync to as the story progresses. That’s right: Miss Nikki and the Tiger Girls is a documentary with musical numbers.
The director was first made aware of Miss Nikki’s efforts through Facebook and shot the film surreptitiously over a half-dozen visits to Burma, listing 'meditation retreat’ on her entry card to fool customs. 'But my early interviews with them revealed their reluctance of being too up-front," she elaborates in the press kit, 'for fear that the regime would punish them. 'No comment’ was a valued response. So we found a way around it by writing songs for the film that told their story. We’d make a musical documentary together."
It is an ingenious gambit that pays off spectacularly in both dramatic and narrative terms, giving a freshness and urgency to a film that scarcely needed more of either. As a measure of its early success connecting with audiences, Miss Nikki and the Tiger Girls garnered a special mention amongst the FOXTEL Australian Documentary Prize field at the Sydney Film Festival. This acclaim is sure to continue: by any yardstick Lamont has created a bellwether work amongst films exploring human rights and social justice issues.
