If the debate about asylum seekers attempting to come to Australia has made your heart a little heavy over the years, be prepared for it to feel like a brick smashed to pieces with a sledgehammer. The full, muscular weight of the feature documentary format has finally tackled the subject with Chasing Asylum, a viscerally intense exposé given gravitas by Academy and Emmy award-winning film-maker Eva Orner.
Orner won an Oscar for producing 2007’s Taxi to the Dark Side, documentarian Alex Gibney’s fastidious investigation into torture practices conducted by America in the name of the “war on terror”. Like Gibney’s film, Chasing Asylum paints a sobering overall picture of a government that asks its citizens to abide by rule of law, but shows little obligation to do so itself (Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers has been found to violate the United Nations Convention Against Torture and has recently been ruled illegal by Papua New Guinea).
Also like Taxi to the Dark Side, it’s the small details rather than the broad brushstrokes in this grim but important film that are breathtakingly inhumane. In the director’s chair for the second time (following 2013’s The Network, which documents Afghanistan’s first independent television station) Orner doesn’t debate whether the boats have stopped. Her stance is they have; her remit is to examine the human cost.
Early moments in the film include vision of the obligatory Citizen Kane of Australian xenophobia speeches: John Howard huffing and puffing about who arrives and the circumstances with which they come. Chasing Asylum is largely comprised of news clips, text inserts, talking heads and secretly recorded, previously unseen footage. It’s the sort of film that, as they say, only comes together in the editing room; some fine forensic assembling here by editor and co-producer Annabelle Johnson.
Low-fi phone-recorded vision bobs around Manus Island detention centre beds and thoroughfares. The place looks like a militarised tent city, or a collection of temporary edifices Walter White might spend an afternoon in. Splotches of graffiti here and there – words such as “welcome to coffin” and “kill us” – hint at the horrors inside, of things we mostly cannot see.
Social workers and support workers recount their stories. One remembers a sign announcing that staff needed to know how to use a Hoffman knife. When asked why, she was told they were the knives used to cut ropes after hangings. Another recalls living quarters infused with the stench of faeces and daily self-harm: detainees cutting themselves, burning themselves, starving themselves, stitching their lips and eyelids shut.
A former Manus Island safety and security officer, Martin (who quit the job after receiving death threats) says he was shocked to see people living in a renovated second world war shed: a huge hot tin hut in thick, humid, tropical conditions. Orner also visits the home countries of asylum seekers to examine the harsh or harrowing circumstances that prompted them to leave.
Chasing Asylum is a 90-minute compendium of shame, captivating for the wrong reasons. At times it is so sad that your eyes well and chills run down your spine. Hot-button Australian documentaries that feel so urgent are rare; when they are made well they come on like cattle prodders to the senses.
Last year the coal seam gas exposé Frackman arrived, a terror-inducing polemic with a premise like a B-grade horror movie: the ground beneath us has literally been sold and filled with poison. The heart of director Tony Krawitz’s 2011 film Tall Man, which examines circumstances surrounding the death in custody of Cameron Mulrunji Doomadgee, wept with a sense of injustice.
In Orner’s documentary we are exposed to many injustices experienced by many people; the Australian dream inverted and thrown to the dogs. With scant access to material that could depict the detainees’ physical and emotional journeys in detail, the director is forced to take a snapshot approach. The film becomes a string of heartbreaking vignettes, matched to a basic timeline of events and facts.
Orner allows her subjects to speak for themselves, in their own voice. Her clearly anti-detention centre stance is communicated through the film’s configuration rather than in front of the camera or by voiceover (a Moore or Pilger-esque onscreen presence would surely have felt self-indulgent).
A balance of sorts is established in visions of chest-beating politicians, all of whom refused to be interviewed (save for Malcolm Fraser – in one of his last interviews – to whom the film is dedicated). Arguments from ministers that stopping the boats saves deaths at sea is touched on but given short shrift; cut to David Marr saying that the government claiming a humane approach, given the circumstances, is “profoundly hypocritical”.
The counter argument is straight out of high school philosophy: the idea one immoral act can be committed in order to prevent a worse one. More could have been made of how this kind of reasoning is used in the ping-pong of political discourse; some more meat on the bones about how Labor became wedged and backflipped. Or why Middle Australia – most of whose recent forebears are immigrants – don’t seem to have qualms in backing a now bipartisan approach.
But perhaps Chasing Asylum wasn’t the best platform for that. Its remit, after all, was to examine the human cost of stopping the boats. On those terms it is not just successful, but awfully and unforgettably effective: vital, evocative and gut-wrenching.
- 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
