A filmmaker in Myanmar turns her grandmother's defiance into art

Verse grew up watching her grandmother run a sawmill in Myanmar, working daily among men in a society that expected women to stay quiet. The older woman never apologized for it. She simply worked, decided, and lived on her own terms—a kind of feminism that didn't need the word.

That inheritance shaped everything Verse would become. When she started as a reporter in 2018, the gender bias hit immediately. She wasn't assigned parliament coverage. The message was clear: certain stories weren't for her. She left journalism within months and joined a women's rights organization instead, where at least the work aligned with what she already knew to be true.

Film school brought the same friction. At Yangon Film School, Verse encountered sexual harassment alongside the usual gatekeeping. Instead of accepting it as the cost of entry, she spoke up directly—and kept speaking until the school established its first-ever zero-tolerance policy. It's the kind of quiet, specific victory that rarely makes headlines but changes the actual lives of people who come after.

Her filmmaking became the natural extension of what her grandmother had already taught her: that women's stories matter, and telling them is a form of resistance. Verse's films center on women who barely appear in mainstream narratives. Her animated film "Exit" follows sex workers in Myanmar, giving texture and humanity to lives that are often reduced to statistics or moral judgments. Through her work, she's not arguing that women deserve to be heard—she's simply making sure they are.

Today, Verse still lives in Myanmar, caring for her aging grandmother. The woman who defied expectations decades ago now watches her granddaughter do the same thing with a camera. For Verse, feminism isn't an ideology she studied. It's something she inherited, practiced, and continues to build—one story at a time.