BURMA'S Aung San Suu Kyi is perhaps the most instantly recognisable woman on the planet and certainly one of the most courageous.

She's only recently been allowed out of her Rangoon front door and back into normal society after almost two decades of house arrest, ordered by the ruling Burmese military junta.

Director Luc Besson, better known as the helmsman of thrillers, cast Michelle Yeoh in the lead role.

Yeoh reshaped her body and her face for the role and she bears an uncanny resemblance to Daw Suu, as the activist is known to her followers.

Besson's film traces Suu Kyi's life from the late 1980s, four decades after the assassination of her democracy leader father.

She returns home from England where she's been living with her Oxford scholar husband Michael Aris (David Thewlis) and their two sons to visit her ailing mother.

Suu Kyi sees at first hand the brutality as ordinary soldiers, acting on orders from the military command, crush any form of political dissent.

This galvanises her into action, but when she agrees to lead the National League for Democracy she's slapped with the house arrest order.

Besson carefully traces the relationship between Suu Kyi and Michael Aris.

The two main actors convey the form of heroism that Aris and Suu Kyi were famous for: that non-violent resistance is the way to bring down military oppression.

And now of course, Suu Kyi has not only been elected to the Burmese national parliament she's also been able to travel to Norway to deliver her Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in person.

She did this only recently, in mid-June in fact.

When the Peace Prize was first awarded way back in 1991 her son had to step up on stage to receive it for her, a moving section of Besson's film.

Much of the information provided to the script writers came from Michael Aris' twin brother Anthony, who was also a Buddhist scholar and a writer of books on Tibetan and Himalayan Buddhism.