Australia’s current refugee policy has been informed by a succession of prime ministers, and four of them have a part to play in the development of Chasing Asylum: a stunning new documentary directed by Eva Orner.
The Oscar-winning Australian was living in New York in 2007 when Kevin Rudd was elected. She thought Labor’s return to power would bring an end to the so-called Pacific Solution, where asylum seekers were transported to detention centres on islands away from the mainland. “We stayed up all night celebrating the end of John Howard, and the [detention] camps closing, and then to my horror they were reopened,” Orner tells Guardian Australia.
“The years went by and Abbott got in and things got worse, in terms of our refugee problem. In 2013 I couldn’t believe what I was seeing – the towbacks, the children …
“If somebody had told me in 2001, when the Pacific Solution started up, that at the beginning of 2014 it would still be going on – I would never have believed them.”
Later she says: “Unless you are a journalist or working in development, most people internationally don’t know about this. I wanted to make a film that would shame Australia.”
Orner, 46, grew up in Melbourne and was educated at Mount Scopus college and Monash University. During the 1990s she worked as a production manager on TV shows Blue Heelers and The Games, before decamping to the United States, where she has lived for more than a decade.
Based primarily in Los Angeles, Orner won an Oscar in 2008 as producer of Taxi to the Dark Side, Alex Gibney’s documentary about torture and the treatment of US prisoners of war in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo. (She made headlines after the win when she described the US government as “a bunch of war criminals”.)
In 2013 she debuted as a director with a documentary about a television station in Afghanistan, called The Network. But all the while, she was closely following the news from back home.
“I was waiting for someone to make a film [about asylum seekers in Australia], but no one was doing it,” she says. So Orner – whose family were Hungarian immigrants, who fled the Holocaust – returned to Melbourne and started fund raising to make her own: a film that would tell the story of Australia’s asylum policy, post-Tampa.
When the nationwide March in March rallies resulted in tens of thousands of people meeting to protest against Abbott government policies, Orner saw it as an opportunity: “If 1% of these people give me money, then we will be able to start.”
“It was an unusual way to make a film – I had never raised money privately. I didn’t want to go to ABC or SBS, they are all under government scrutiny. I believed there would be enough wealthy individuals and punters who would be prepared to donate.”
Rich folk were approached, as were administrators of charitable trusts. “People stepped up … and goodwill prevailed,” says Orner.
The next part of Orner’s campaign was to start sourcing material for the film, whose main focus would be the infamously inaccessible detention centres at Manus Island and on Nauru.
“If I had known how tough it would be to make this film, I would never have made it,” says Orner. “You are trying to make a documentary about people that you can’t film, where you don’t have access to the camps, where the government won’t speak to you and where new whistleblower legislation makes it risky for anyone to talk to you.”
But she persevered, and eventually found people willing to speak about their time working in detention centres.
In the documentary, Orner interviews activists, lawyers and journalists such as David Marr, as well as people who worked in the camps, and families of people detained in them. Spliced throughout are clips of news stories and press conferences, in which a succession of Australia’s prime ministers and immigration ministers talk tough on the issue of ‘border protection’.
Orner also travelled to countries such as Iran, to interview asylum seekers and their families: those who had returned, those who were stuck in limbo in places like Indonesia, and those whose husbands and brothers had disappeared at sea while seeking asylum.
But the footage that would be at the heart of the film needed to come from the camps themselves.
The film doesn’t focus on the story of any one asylum seeker; instead, it provides a sweeping look at the human cost of Australia’s mandatory detention policy. Riots, mass self harm and the deaths of Reza Berati and Hamid Kehazaei all feature.
Australian offshore detention centres are shrouded in secrecy, with legislation punishing anyone who shoots unauthorised footage from inside, or speaks out about what is occurring in the camps. Whistleblowers can be sent to jail. Yet some spoke out.
Their stories are like dispatches from Hades, giving us glimpses into a nightmarish world of pain, disease, violence, despair, boredom and terror.
One of the first interviewees worked in Nauru. She has a girlish voice, with a rising inflection, and can’t be older than her early twenties: “They asked if we were trained to use a Hoffman’s knife? The knife used to cut people down when they are hanging?”
The Salvation Army workers arriving in Nauru were mainly young and inexperienced. The young woman reels through their credentials: a manager at McDonalds, a supervisor at JB HiFi, a night fill at a supermarket. “I knew it was a detention centre; I didn’t know people had been there for 400, 500 days,” the worker says.
Many of the workers were traumatised by the experience, but kept coming back out of compassion for the refugees, and a sense of responsibility towards them.
Orner says that after the camps were reopened, the hiring was rushed; the Salvation Army, who got the contract, resorted to Facebook for the job ads. “The people selected were inexperienced. They had no training or preparation. Now the camps are just run by security companies – there is no care. There are now people who have been in there for a thousand days.”
These workers are the heroes of the story, but there is very little glory in it for them.
“They are taking risks to speak out – they are a combination of really young, inexperienced [workers] and people like Martin [a former Manus Island safety and security officer], who was older, a prison officer,” Orner says. “Every whistleblower that I interviewed wept during the interviews ... They were so brave. Not many people talk. Whistleblower laws scare people.”
Orner is understandably more cagey about the incredible footage filmed inside the detention centres. It was filmed secretly and captures something that the tens of thousands of words written about asylum seeker policies can’t: that Australia’s detention centres are hell on earth.
The tents are mouldy, the fences are high, there is no privacy, the bathrooms are filthy and some of the men are housed in a tin second world war shed – in the tropics. Graffiti on the tents reads, “Kill us.”
Whether she got footage from multiple sources or had one major source at each camp, she won’t say.
So distressing is the film that there is an argument to be made that it feeds into the government’s strategy of deterrence. After seeing the footage of Nauru and Manus, it’s difficult to imagine any place that’s worse, or that is home to more suffering.
“There is no point in trying to come to Australia now by boat,” says Orner, in an odd echo of the government’s line. “I don’t think the film can do any damage [to people seeking asylum]. It’s important to expose what’s going on.”
Orner says that part of the shame inherent in the film lies with the Australian people (“people are scared, frightened, xenophobic and racist, and the government uses that to their advantage”), but most of it with the country’s politicians.
“How can you have policy change when the two major parties compete to see who can be the toughest on asylum seekers?” asks Orner. “The fact that the Labor party supports off-shore detention is a real crisis point for Australian politics.”
The film ends on an interview with the fourth prime minister to have a profound and explicit influence on the director: Malcolm Fraser. He was the only politician who agreed to be interviewed for the film. It was the last interview he gave before his death in March 2015.
“I remember when Fraser let the Vietnamese [refugees] in, and people were saying terrible things about him. But he had such enormous foresight and bravery to let people in.”
Fraser’s policy of resettling Vietnamese people in Australia in the 1970s is a reminder to our current crop of politicians that there is another way to approach the asylum seeker issue.
“It [resettlement in Australia] was the right thing to do, especially considering we had been involved in the conflict,” Fraser says in the film, referring to Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam war. Orner believes we should follow that logic to modern conflicts Australia is involved in, in Syria, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Yemen; that we should bear some responsibility for resettling refugees those conflicts have displaced.
“At Fraser’s funeral, the Vietnamese people thanked him for being their saviour. How many politicians could claim that?”
Chasing Asylum is dedicated to Malcolm Fraser. Orner hopes that the film will make people more aware and compassionate when it comes to asylum seekers.
“When I started making the film, I realised very quickly: until you see something, it’s easy to ignore it. I thought it was vitally important to see Manus and Nauru. And if Australians could see it – and Australian politicians could see it – they could not accept the current system.”
- Chasing Asylum premieres at the Human Rights Arts & Film festival (touring nationally in May and June). Guardian Australia’s Helen Davidson will be moderating the festival’s screening of Chasing Asylum and Q&A in Darwin on 7 June. The film’s release is accompanied by a book detailing the making-of, published by Harper Collins