Sophie Ansel was born in Brittany and has worked in Taiwan, the United States, Australia, Malaysia, and Thailand. In 2005 and 2006 she first went to Burma, where five years of investigation led her to collect the testimonies of hundreds of Burmese of all ethnicities and led to her first work about the subject, the film Dans l'ombre de ton sourire (2007). She has also written the testimony of Navy Soth called Les Larmes Interdites (Forbidden Tears), and the biography of Habib, a stateless young Burmese called Nous les innommables-un tabou birman.
