If a shocking documentary about the fate of Myanmar's cyclone orphans wins a prestigious video-journalism award in London tomorrow night, it will be some time before one of the men who shot it gets a chance to celebrate.

Six months after shooting on the film was completed, the cameraman known only as T was arrested coming out of an internet café in Yangon and taken to the city's Insein prison.

Last week, after four months in jail, he was told he would be charged with the new offence of filming without government permission, which carries a minimum jail sentence of 10 years.

The Rory Peck awards are given annually to freelance video cameramen and documentary makers who run the sort of risks which Peck, who was shot dead while filming the siege of the Russian parliament in 1993, took every day.

In Myanmar - formerly known as Burma - the challenges are rather different. The risks of getting shot or bombed while filming in the peaceable, agrarian Irrawaddy delta south of Rangoon are low. But, in other respects, this must be one of the most dangerous assignments in the world.

The film follows a number of children orphaned by Cyclone Nargis, which struck southern Myanmar in May 2008, killing 140,000 people in the delta and making 2.4 million homeless, as they struggle to survive in the absence of their parents, and with negligible assistance from the state.

T and his colleague, another Myanmar citizen identified as Z who is currently hiding out in Thailand, even filmed an appearance by General Thein Sein, the junta's Prime Minister, before a group of desperate villagers telling them to get back to work and to expect nothing from the state for some time.

T joins 13 other cameramen working for the Oslo-based Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) who have been jailed by the authorities since the Saffron Revolution in 2007, the mass uprising led by monks which shook Asia's most repressive regime to the core.

Ever since the coup d'etat of 1962 which brought General Ne Win to power, Myanmar's ruling generals have done everything in their power to control the images of the country which reach the outside world.

Foreign journalists are almost never let in, and those who enter as tourists are frequently deported. Ubiquitous spies make it immensely risky for those in Myanmar to blow the whistle on the regime.

But the internet and the shrinking size of video cameras have given dissidents new ways of getting their words and pictures out - as the junta discovered in September 2007, when freelance video cameramen working for DVB shot the swelling protest marches of the monks and sent them abroad.

The pictures were picked up by news networks around the world, giving the regime its worst publicity for decades.