Dear Daughter
A young Burmese woman who was trafficked to China and sold into marriage tells her story. Based on the protagonist’s own words, beautifully rendered in pen and ink, this animation portrays a woman torn between her love for the child she was forced to bear and her longing for the country to which she may never be able to return.
Hsu Pan Naing was born in Yangon, in 1997. The daughter of a writer, she grew up surrounded by the books of her mother and many other writers, and soon fell in love with storytelling. Shortly after receiving her journalism degree from the National Management Degree College, she was hired by The Myanmar Times as a video journalist. Keen to further explore the moving image, she gave up her job to attend the Yangon Film School in 2020, and has since worked in various roles, including as sound recordist on The Singing Bookman (Dir. Nan Cho Lae Yee Thein). Her first brush with animation was Reborn, a short film she co-created with other students during a YFS Animation & Mixed Media course in 2021. Developed at a time when the pandemic and the military coup made independent filmmaking in Myanmar more challenging than ever, Dear Daughter marks her first film as a director in her own right. She is currently working as an intern in a developmental organization whilst developing her first short drama, Lost Girl, with support from the Myanmar Script Fund.
