In July 2013, the Australian Government introduced a controversial immigration policy, transferring asylum seekers arriving by boat to remote offshore detention centres on foreign Pacific islands. Seven months later, the Manus Island centre erupted in violence when police and guards put down protests with sticks, machetes and guns, and 23 year-old asylum seeker Reza Barati was killed.
The men of Manus Island are the hidden, the silenced. The 1,000 asylum seekers held in immigration detention on the Papua New Guinean island are distant and cut off. None will return to Australia.
Almost all visitors are banned from the Australian government-run centre, journalists are particularly forbidden, and when trouble occasionally ferments and snippets of video footage of protests emerge from within the centre, phones and pens and books are taken from the detainees. Staff have their emails and webpages monitored.
The men have few ways of making their voices heard. But after riots in the centre in February 2014, filmmaker Lukas Schrank read an interview with two men in detention on the island, and was stunned to find it was the only one. “This was the only interview that I could find with people in detention. It seemed like there was a voice missing from the discussion.”
The interview was the genesis of a new film – and a new way of telling a story previously unheard. Schrank has created Nowhere Line: Voices from Manus Island, an animated film that details the journeys of two asylum seekers held in Manus’s isolated immigration detention centre. The voices of the men, recorded down a grainy phone line from the island, form the narration of the 15-minute film.
(Article by Ben Doherty @bendohertycorro published in The Guardian)
Watch Nowwhere Line on Vimeo : https://vimeo.com/152158702
The men of Manus Island are the hidden, the silenced. The 1,000 asylum seekers held in immigration detention on the Papua New Guinean island are distant and cut off. None will return to Australia.
Almost all visitors are banned from the Australian government-run centre, journalists are particularly forbidden, and when trouble occasionally ferments and snippets of video footage of protests emerge from within the centre, phones and pens and books are taken from the detainees. Staff have their emails and webpages monitored.
The men have few ways of making their voices heard. But after riots in the centre in February 2014, filmmaker Lukas Schrank read an interview with two men in detention on the island, and was stunned to find it was the only one. “This was the only interview that I could find with people in detention. It seemed like there was a voice missing from the discussion.”
The interview was the genesis of a new film – and a new way of telling a story previously unheard. Schrank has created Nowhere Line: Voices from Manus Island, an animated film that details the journeys of two asylum seekers held in Manus’s isolated immigration detention centre. The voices of the men, recorded down a grainy phone line from the island, form the narration of the 15-minute film.
(Article by Ben Doherty @bendohertycorro published in The Guardian)
Watch Nowwhere Line on Vimeo : https://vimeo.com/152158702
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