The Lady

The Lady (2011) is a French-British biographical drama directed by Luc Besson — watch it online on iFILM. Michelle Yeoh plays Aung San Suu Kyi, who returned to Burma in 1988 for her mother's illness and never came home, because home became the fight.

She led opposition to the military junta. The first arrest came in 1989. For much of the next twenty years she was confined to her house in Rangoon — a building surrounded by guards while the world kept moving outside the gate. David Thewlis plays her husband Michael Aris, an Oxford academic working from England to hold the family together across an impossible distance. They were permitted almost no contact. Suu Kyi refused to leave: she understood that crossing the border meant never being allowed back. Michael died of cancer in 1999. She could not go to him.

Besson frames the story as a portrait of two people pulled apart by principle rather than indifference. Suu Kyi received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 while under confinement. Stream The Lady (2011) online on iFILM.