As a child from a poor farming family in a remote village in central Myanmar, 26-year-old Mi Mi Lwin never imagined she would one day win a grand prize as a film director in her own country, much less abroad.

Her parents work on a toddy palm plantation in the Mandalay Region of central Myanmar, where her father climbs the trees to collect palm syrup and her mother uses it to make jiggery sweets to earn a living.

While growing up, she and her two brothers used to help their parents with their work, when they were not attending the village's school where they were taught by Buddhist monks.

But in June last year, this erstwhile country girl found herself on stage at the Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia in Tokyo, receiving the Grand Prix award for her film Sugar & Spice, a 16-minute documentary about rural life in Myanmar.

Lwin was helping her parents with farm work when she got a telephone call from Tokyo asking her to attend the film festival where hers was among 9,000 entries submitted from over 140 countries.

With support from festival organizers and friends at Yangon Film School, which produced and submitted her film for consideration, she made it to Tokyo, despite earlier opting not to go for lack of funds, and was both surprised and thrilled to win the top prize.

Sugar & Spice is a portrait of Lwin's hard-working parents living their simple and peaceful rural existence.

"When I was receiving the prize, I feel I really wanted to have my parents there with me. My film is about them, their lives. So I wanted them to know and witness the moment," she said.

Lwin said she believes her film won because it conveyed powerful messages on "how the people are struggling in their daily lives, the risks they are taking for just a low income," while also touching on the political situation in her rapidly transforming country.

One scene, for example, shows her parents arguing over the value of expanding one's knowledge, with the husband trying to justify his passion for reading and his wife insisting that such time would be better spent working to earn more money.

In the scene, her father speaks about a police crackdown on student protesters to underscore how important information can be gleaned from newspapers.

Lwin said she wanted that scene to convey to viewers a message about freedom of expression and human rights, which have long been lacking in Myanmar.

Her interest in filmmaking dates back to 2006 when, as a ninth-grade student, she first met an all-woman film crew from Yangon Film School who were visiting her village to work on a documentary about the rural people and their culture.

The crew chose Lwin's family as the subject for their documentary film, which focused on their going to a pagoda festival in the nearby ancient city of Bagan.

She was very excited to see all the cameras and equipment and struck by the fact the crew were all women. Three of them, in later years, became her close friends and helped her move to Yangon and join the film school there.

After high school however, Lwin, at her father's advice, went to an agriculture university near the capital Naypyitaw, far from her village, aiming for a career in agriculture.

It was only after she graduated from there in 2013 that she decided instead to pursue her dream of becoming a filmmaker, moving later that same year to Yangon.

She was accepted the following year by Yangon Film School for a two-year training course as one of 12 new students.

On Myanmar's political situation, Lwin said that she, like many others, had high expectations when Aung San Suu Kyi and her National League for Democracy won the 2015 general election by a landslide and came to power the following year.

But as the term of Suu Kyi's government passes the two year mark, she has started to lose hope of her country becoming truly free and much more developed under a genuine democratic government.

"I do not see any significant development in rural areas after this government came to power. Youth in rural areas have to mainly rely on migration (to neighboring countries) as there are still no job opportunities. Earnings for work are also very low in the rural villages," she said.

And while freedom of expression has undoubtedly improved compared with the era of military rule, when films had to go through notoriously strict censorship, Lwin still feels something is holding her back.

Even now, she said, the police "monitor the filmmaking crews all the time when we shoot the scenes in rural areas."

"It is quite annoying for us. I do not feel there is total freedom of expression yet," she said.

Lwin now lives in Yangon where she works as a freelance filmmaker and takes short courses on new subjects at the same film school, while occasionally returning to home to help out her parents.

She said she is now thinking of making a documentary on rural people suffering from mental illness and the myriad problems they face, including primitive and abusive methods of treatment.

"In the cities, everyone knows that they can send them to mental hospitals or special treatment centers. But in rural areas, most people don't know there is proper medical treatment for mentally ill persons," she said.