Last month, I had both the honor and the pleasure of interviewing U Pyinya Zawta, a founding member and the executive director of the All Burma’s Monks’ Alliance, for my blog here at Shambhala SunSpace. After spending ten years of his life behind bars for pro-democracy activities, he was one of the leaders of 2007’s “Saffron Revolution”—the nonviolent demonstration by thousands of Buddhist monastics and other that called for economic and political justice in the military-ruled country.

When I spoke to him, U Pyinya Zawta was on his way to the 82nd Annual Academy Awards, where he was a guest of those attending with Best Documentary Feature nominee Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country. (The Oscar ultimately went to The Cove.) Directed by Anders Østergaard and distributed by Oscilloscope Laboratories, which is headed up by Beastie Boy and Tibet activist Adam Yauch, the film features the work of citizen journalists inside the Saffron Revolution. Through stylized reenactments of key moments, it also tells the story of the video journalists’ struggles to get their footage of the brutally quashed uprising to the offices of the Democratic Voice of Burma in Oslo, Norway.

Burma VJ will have its U.S. television debut on Tuesday, April 20th (9:30-11:00 p.m. ET/PT), exclusively on HBO. The network was kind to enough to offer us interviews with both the Oscar-nominated Mr. Østergaard (in Denmark) and the Democratic Voice of Burma’s executive director Aye Chan Naing (in Norway). I spoke to them separately by phone.

Read full interview here.