Director Aung Phyoe and Producer Thu Thu Shein on the Crystal Globe Grand Prix Winner, Fruit Gathering, Myanmar’s first film at Karlovy Vary, and the decade-long journey behind its making.
Aung Phyoe did not set out with a story. He set out, he tells me, with an atmosphere and a train. Some years ago, newly returned to Yangon, Burma, after studying engineering in Singapore and still finding his way back into the texture of a country he had been away from, he took to riding the city’s circular railway, sometimes with friends, often alone, watching the industrial zones slide past the window. In one of those passes, he noticed young women moving through the narrow lanes between factories. “That image really struck me,” he says. He didn’t know their stories. But something about it, a sadness he couldn’t name, refused to let him go.
It isn’t hard to see why Aung Phyoe, an only child raised largely among women — his mother, his grandmothers, the girls who worked the looms at his grandparents’ weaving house and the ice-candy stall nearby — grew up steeped in a kind of femininity he took, for years, entirely for granted. “I don’t know why all the women are working,” he says, almost bemused by his own memory. “I don’t know why there’s a man.”
Fruit Gathering, his feature debut and the first film from Myanmar ever to premiere at the 60th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in the Crystal Globe Competition, is in many ways an attempt to return to that world and finally look at it properly.
The film that eventually emerged, Thit-thee Khu, aka Fruit Gathering, following two young women, San Kyi and Theint Theint Oo, as it unfolded over a year and a half of factory work in industrial Yangon, took over a decade to arrive at its final shape. Aung Phyoe first wrote the material as a short story more than twelve years ago, back when, in his words, he still wanted to be a writer rather than a filmmaker and still finds prose “more difficult than cinema.” An entirely different draft imagined the whole story compressed into a single evening, structured around one character’s wedding. None of that survives in the finished film, but the character work underneath it does. “What’s very clear for me is the characters, the setting, the atmosphere, and the relationship,” he says. “What happens, that’s what really shifted along the way.”
He describes his writing process less as architecture than as accumulation: “I use myself as a magnet, and whatever comes towards me is iron, and I put it there. Some of it stays. Some doesn’t.” A couple he once watched outside his workplace, their specific mannerisms, ended up folded into the script without his fully deciding to put them there. It is, he says, “a kind of collecting” moments gathered and later sifted, kept or discarded, the way you might sort fruit.
Aung Phyoe is careful, almost protective, about how the film approaches the relationship between its two women. He didn’t want a film that announces itself, he says, nothing “loud and proud,” nothing that reduces the connection between San Kyi and Theint Theint Oo to a single, legible category. Raised by his mother and grandmother, with his father largely absent for work, he says he learned early that the kindness of a woman carries a different weight than the kindness of a man and that closeness between women in Myanmar already exists in a much more permissive, if unspoken, register than closeness between men. “You can see other girls in the frame holding hands, touching each other,” he says, “they may not be a couple.” The earliest drafts of the script had no sexual dimension at all — only friendship, longing, and complication. It was only in the writing that he came to feel a story built purely on longing risked going nowhere; something more had to happen for the film to actually arrive anywhere emotionally.
The two women themselves are drawn in deliberate contrast: one more reserved and protected, the other more pragmatic and outwardly confident, and Aung Phyoe locates the root of that asymmetry in his own temperament rather than any broader statement about Burmese womanhood. He describes himself as having been sheltered, even naïve, growing up in a household that, for all its traditionalism, never quite prepared him for practical adulthood; he learned to manage money, and much else, only once he was on his own in Singapore. That same fascination with people who “know how to operate” in the world, he says, is what draws him to more assured personalities generally and what shaped the more confident of his two leads. Of the more reserved of them, the one who ultimately proves more courageous than he considers himself to be, he’s blunt: “I will never do the way she did. So maybe the things I cannot do, I let her do.”
Music and rhythm run underneath the whole film, and Aung Phyoe traces that back to his own early training as a classical singer, a path his parents steered him away from and toward engineering instead, though the music never left him. It resurfaced properly, he says, once a mentor during his editing studies insisted that he understand music as a discipline in its own right; he went back and retrained, briefly, in the classical basics.
That training happened in India, at Whistling Woods International in Mumbai, though Aung Phyoe is quick to clarify that the country itself, rather than the city, is what left the mark. He found daily life in Mumbai genuinely disorienting; what stayed with him instead was Indian cinema, and specifically the tradition of parallel and regional filmmaking he’d already loved before he arrived — Ritwik Ghatak, G. Aravindan, Adoor Gopalakrishnan among the names he cites — all of it at a careful remove from Bollywood. He points to the shared roots of Buddhism and Hinduism during the Pagan era as one reason that cinema felt legible to him despite the distance, even without a full grasp of its iconography. What he took from those filmmakers wasn’t their politics, he’s careful to note; he doesn’t consider himself as overtly political a filmmaker as Ghatak, but their rhythm, which he then had to unlearn just enough to build something recognizably his own. “It might look similar to Indian cinema in the beginning,” he says, “but I had to create my own rhythm of Burma.”
If Aung Phyoe’s account of the film is about atmosphere accumulating slowly into shape, producer Thu Thu Shein’s account of joining the project is about something more immediate: him, before the story. “I never think about the story first,” she adds, “if I can work with this person, this is it. I will work. The story comes second.”
Aung Phyoe, true to what she describes as a distinctly Burmese and Indian instinct, never handed her a script to begin with; he narrated the story to her in person. “I don’t like somebody to hand over the pages,” she says. “You can feel it, how passionate someone is about their story and their characters, verbally, emotionally, on their face.”
Their collaboration deepened during the pandemic, when Shein, who describes herself as more drawn to poetry than to prose, began reading the Japanese literature Aung Phyoe was working through at the time, in an effort to understand his instincts better. She encouraged him toward poetry over straightforward narrative logic at certain points in the process: not to over-explain the story’s internal rhythm, not to over-stretch a scene when a break in the rhythm might say more. “Literature alone isn’t enough,” she says. “You can mix in the feeling.” She also brought her own documentary background to bear on the factory scenes, feeding Aung Phyoe observations from her own experience of that world during the script’s early drafts, when the characters weren’t yet fully legible even to their own writer.
Both Aung Phyoe and Shein are candid about how difficult it was to get Fruit Gathering this far. Political and social realities in Myanmar mean that even independent filmmaking of the ordinary, resource-starved kind carries an additional weight of caution: political material, Aung Phyoe notes, has to stay deliberately subtle, and Shein describes the entire process, from financing to production to travel, as simply slower than it would be almost anywhere else. That the film’s Czech co-producer Vít Janeček helped make Karlovy Vary a realistic and welcoming launch point mattered enormously, in Shein’s telling; being the first Myanmar film ever selected for the festival’s Crystal Globe Competition already feels, to both of them, like a door opening rather than a single achievement in itself.
Aung Phyoe is already looking past this film, toward material about a mother and son each confronting a loss the other cannot yet face — a deliberate answer, he says, to what he sees as San Kyi’s unfinished arc in Fruit Gathering. “She can’t accept it,” he says of his own protagonist. “My next characters, at least, I want to be able to.”
Whether or not that next film manages it, Fruit Gathering has already done something no Burmese film has done before: it put Myanmar, quietly and without asking permission, on Karlovy Vary’s map.
The 60th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival runs from July 3 to 11, 2026.
