Welcome to the ‘Moving to Mars’ blog.
Directed by Mat Whitecross (co-director of the award-winning film The Road to Guantanamo) and produced by Karen Katz, Moving to Mars tells the story of two Burmese refugee families, during a year that will change their lives completely.
Thaw Htoo, Jo Kae and their families are part of Burma’s Karen tribe, an ethnic group heavily oppressed by the ruling military junta. Forced from their homes by military aggression, the two families have lived in Mae La Camp – a 3km enclosure on the Thai-Burma border – for almost twenty years. With conditions in the camp overcrowded and basic, and with no real future for their children, the families opt for relocation abroad. Their new home will be Sheffield, a large and bustling city in the north of England. For two families used to living within the confines of a refugee camp, whose children who have never even seen the outside world, their new lives will be different to anything they’ve ever known. Filmed over two years in Thailand and Sheffield, the film follows the families as they prepare to leave Mae La, as they travel to the UK, and as they struggle to establish themselves in a strange new city.
After completing the film in March 2009, we’ve been feverishly applying to film festivals, and will hopefully have some exciting news on that front in the near future. The film will also screen on UK More4 in November, as part of the highly acclaimed True Stories strand.
All Moving to Mars news will be posted on this blog. The plan is to link it up with our website and have everything working together in perfect harmony (!) but right now the website is yet to be… so until then, some photos are up on our Facebook group – please take a look (and then add us!).
Thanks for reading – we’ll be back with more news in the very near future.
Moving to Mars 