Kaung Swan Thar was born in Thanlyin on the other side of the Bago river from the city of Yangon in 1997. He took up studies in history at Yangon’s Eastern University in 2019 but his desire to use images to tell stories has since drawn him to photography and, in 2020, he started training in filmmaking at YFS. An alumnus of the Yangon Photo Festival, his 2017 photo-story ‘Underground Lives’ portrays the people who live underneath railway workers’ dwellings. Dala Boatbreakersis his first film as a director.