Total Denial is the story of a historical lawsuit: 15 villagers from the jungle of Burma suing a leading oil corporation for human rights abuses in an American Court. After 10 years of fierce legal battles, the impossible victory. For five years Milena Kaneva has been following the abuses over the local population: the Burmese army, hired by the oil companies, forces the local population into slave labour, burned villages, raped women, tortured and killed porters. Hundred’s of thousands of men, women and children hiding in the jungle are the picture of a silent genocide. This is also the story of Ka Hsaw Wa, one of the leaders of the student’s movement for democracy in Burma in 1988. He has been hiding in the jungle for more than 7 years. In 1995 with the co-founder of Earth Rights International Katie Redford, later his wife, he brought this precedent setting lawsuit to an American court.

Screenplay Milena Kaneva
Photography (colour) Milena Kaneva
Editing Nina Altuparmakova, Kalin Serapionov, Chris Schwerin
Music Nikolai Ivanov-OM
Sound Milena Kaneva, Blagomir Alexiev, ARS DIGITAL STUDIO
Production Milena Kaneva, MK Production
Year of production 2006
Running time 78’
Format DV CAM e mini DV

Milena Kaneva

Milena Kaneva, born in Rousse, Bulgary, studied acting at the Sofia Theater and Film Academy. She moved to Italy in 1987, where began to work as a journalist and producer with news agencies. She has shot reports worldide. Her exclusive interview with Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Prize laureate kept under house arrest by the military dictatorship, connected her to Burma forever. In 2000 produced her first long documentary The Initiation about the female genital mutilation in Mali, won the first prize at the Festival dei Due Mondi. Total Denial has been awarded with the special prize for
Human Rights Vaclav Havel at the One World Festival in Prague in 2006.