Kaung Swan Thar was born in Thanlyin on the other side of the Bago river from 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 Boatbreakers (2021), his first film as a director, was honoured by being selected for the prestigious ethnographic film Festival Jean Rouch in Paris. He has since made two more documentaries, one about a punk musician who helps run a soup kitchen and the other Pilikan – A Hindu Temple in Thanlyin in Myanmar.