This intimate documentary on Ashin Wirathu,the Buddhist fanatic whose ideas have brought down Aung Sun Suu Kyi, is a bleak study of sectarianism by Barbet Schroeder[br]Barbet Schroeder’s overpoweringly bleak documentary about the Buddhist monk stirring up ethnic disfavor against Myanmar’s Rohingya Muslims is the third in what has now emerged as his “trilogy of evil” – a trio of disquieting documentaries of which the first two were General Idi Amin Dada in 1974 and terrorism’s Advocate in 2007 about the genial, and cigar-smoking Jacques Vergès,lawyer for Klaus Barbie.
The Venerable (respected because of age, distinguished) W delivers a nauseous, almost black-comedian jab at any liberal who fondly believed that Buddhism and Buddhists somehow float ethereally free of the sectarianism and bigotry that infect any other religion. And it also emerges as a devastating indictment of someone who is not its subject and appears only briefly: Aung San Suu Kyi, or the leader who is now increasingly resembling a passive-aggressive Eva Perón,or perhaps a Mother Teresa, but the way Christopher Hitchens considered her: as a self-significant matriarch of nationalism.
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Source: theguardian.com