Eva’s fight for asylum seekers

OSCAR-winning filmmaker Eva Orner’s latest documentary, Chasing Asylum, is sobering and powerful. Using footage obtained clandestinely from insiders on Manus Island in northern Papua New Guinea, Orner takes us inside the heavily guarded detention centre, and challenges the Australian government to overturn its current “Turn back the boats” policy on so-called illegal boat arrivals in Australia.

This policy has resulted in asylum seekers being detained on Manus Island indefinitely since the detention centre was built in 2001.

Based in Los Angeles, Orner began work on Chasing Asylum in 2014 in reaction to the view held by both the Australian government and the Federal Opposition that long-term detention on Manus Island is a humane response to human suffering.

The documentary has been screened at festivals around Australia including the Melbourne Jewish Writers Festival before opening in cinemas on May 26.

I spoke with Orner by phone from New York shortly after the Supreme Court of Papua New Guinea ruled that the detention of asylum seekers on Manus Island breached the country’s constitution regarding human rights, and ordered the closure of the Australian government-funded facility.

When asked about her views on this new development, Orner was emphatic: “I’m deeply cynical about it, and I hate to say it, but I don’t think it will make any difference in the scheme of things.

“I hope I am wrong. I hope I am surprised. While we were editing the film there was a High Court challenge in Australia about the legality of Nauru, so the government quickly made the Nauru detention centre an open centre, which meant that people weren’t actually detained there.

“I’m surprised that of all the governments, Papua New Guinea is the one that has stood up and said detention is illegal. The Australian government’s response is that nothing will change. They are saying adamantly that no-one will enter Australia, whether they’re genuine refugees or not. So I don’t anticipate that anything will change.”

Born and educated in Melbourne, Orner is a film producer and director with a slew of documentary feature films to her credit. These include Untold Desires, the winner of Best Documentary at the 1994 AFI Awards, Taxi to the Dark Side, winner of the 2008 Academy Award for Best Documentary about US torture practices in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, and The Network (2013), a documentary set behind the scenes of Afghanistan’s largest television station.  She has been based in the US for the past decade

A telling moment in Chasing Asylum is journalist and commentator David Marr’s reference to the 1951 United Nations Convention. Established by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, this treaty – to which Australia is a signatory – makes it a human right to flee persecution and conflict.

Moreover, it came, as Marr explains, in response to immigration laws in place in Europe and elsewhere in the 1930s, which prevented Jews from escaping Nazism.

“I’m think I’m a realist with slight optimistic tendencies,” says Orner, who believes strongly that her preoccupation with injustice and the dark side of human nature comes from her Jewish heritage and upbringing.

“My parents were both born in 1937 in Poland. I had one surviving grandparent out of four who survived the Holocaust, and out of two very large families, less than a handful of people emerged alive.

“My parents came to Australia in the 1950s. They had the good fortune to be welcomed here, to be able to get educated and start businesses, and be successful.

“As a result I had a lovely middle-class life. I lived in a democracy and was educated. I can do the work that I want to. I grew up in the shadow of genocide. My parents had accents; they’d gone through tragedy in their family. Despite this I had a funny, happy upbringing.

“But I was very aware at a young age that bad things happen to people. That pretty much informs my work, and I felt that I couldn’t stand by any longer, despite not having lived in Australia for over a decade, without saying something.”

Chasing Asylum makes its point through interviews with disillusioned young workers who had hoped to make a difference, a former security guard who could no longer bear the work he was expected to do, several former inmates now overseas, and the jerky, hand-held footage which exposes the punitive soullessness of the place.

Most affecting are the interviews in Iran with the parents of Reza Berati, the 23-year-old asylum seeker who died as a victim of the riots that engulfed Manus Island in 2015, and the family of 24-year-old Hamid Kehazaei, who died from a heart-attack after developing septicaemia from a cut in the foot.

“I filmed asylum seekers who had been at both Manus Island and Nauru, in Lebanon, Iran and Afghanistan,” says Orner.

“It was very hard to find people, and hard to convince them to talk. Some of them couldn’t show their faces because they were in danger. It was pretty heartbreaking.

“Every time I went into somebody’s house they knew I was Australian, they knew I was from the country that had done this to them, and they only showed me kindness and forgiveness.”

Perhaps most disturbing is the quick cross-cutting sequence of prime ministers from both sides of Australian politics who are shown maintaining a “zero tolerance” attitude towards what are still called illegal boat arrivals in Australia. The only exception to this list is Malcolm Fraser, to whom Orner dedicates her film.

“He’s a very real hero to me, and it was such an honour to meet him and be one of the last to interview him,” says Orner.

“When he died, I knew that I wanted to dedicate the film to him.

I asked every prime minister, from John Howard to Malcolm Turnbull, to appear in the film, as well as the last two immigration ministers, but they all turned me down.”

Orner says that she was not able to approach Australian government agencies to help fund her film “for obvious reasons”. Instead she has relied on private funding, with about 40-50 per cent of the budget coming from the Australian Jewish community, as either investments, donations or through foundations.

“I’m very aware that a lot of Jewish people feel negatively about this issue, and I think that’s partly driven because a lot of people seeking asylum here are Muslim and Arabs,” she says.

“But on the upside, and that is where you have to be a little bit optimistic I think, an enormous number of Jewish people donated to the film, and an enormous number of people who weren’t Jewish. There was also an enormous number of people who donated that I didn’t know at all. I think that says a lot about people in general, that they’re not happy with what is happening .”

Chasing Asylum opens in selected cinemas on May 26.

REPORT by Jan Epstein

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