Illustration by Gregory Mackay
Follow Lee on TwitterThis article appears in The Incarceration Issue, a special edition of VICE Australia.
Hours after winning an Academy Award, Eva Orner called the US government "a bunch of war criminals."
It was 2008, and Taxi to the Dark Side had just surprised everyone by taking out Best Documentary. The film exposed the US military's use of torture in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Orner was not going to pass up the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to use the world's microphones as they pointed in her direction.
The Australian ex-pat is an energetic, charismatic figure who is not afraid of controversy. Her first film as producer, 1994's Untold Desires, examined the sexual life of Australians with disabilities, and won Best Documentary at the AFI Awards, the Logies, and the Australian Human Rights Awards.
Orner has now turned her focus to Australia's treatment of asylum seekers via a new documentary that tracks a range of perilous journeys from their far-flung origins to Australia. To date, the film has been shot all around the world, from Afghanistan to Cambodia, and from the protective way Orner ushers me out of the edit suite I suspect it's filled with some explosive revelations.
"I left Australia in 2004 when this issue was already a pretty big deal," she says. "My big memory of before I left was watching the Tampa unfold, watching 9/11, watching Howard hang on to power."
The Australian ex-pat is an energetic, charismatic figure who is not afraid of controversy.
Orner's career took her to the States, where she's been based for the last 10 years. "I missed quite a big change in Australia in terms of the rise of conservatism, xenophobia, and, I'll say it, some racism," she remarks. "Xenophobia is a polite way of saying racism. For the past few years I've been watching what's going on here from a distance."
In 2007, Eva stayed up all night in New York with Australian friends as the election results trickled in. She describes the elation when Kevin Rudd won, followed by the horror as the party came crashing down. She doesn't have a high opinion of Labor, and much of that is down to their treatment of refugees.
"Labor are the ones who reopened the camps," she says. "I don't see much of a differentiation between the two parties anymore, which is shocking to me. So I've just been watching and getting angrier and angrier, and I've been waiting for someone to make a film about it."
That feeling of anger led to action. Orner felt she had to do something, and, encouraged by friends, she decided to make a film about what was really going on. "Films have been made about refugees and asylum seekers," she adds, "but I wanted to make something on a bigger scale, that consolidates recent history and a lot of information into a more global film that will be seen internationally as well as here in Australia."
From the beginning of production, it was clear that Orner wouldn't be able to get to Nauru, the island where many asylum seekers are kept in detention by Australia. "That world is very secretive and very covert, and the Australian government does everything it can to keep the media out," Orner states. "Do you know how much it costs to apply for a journalist visa to Nauru?" she asks, not skipping a beat: "Eight thousand dollars, and the fee is non-refundable, and no journalists are given access to the place. Tell me something dark is not happening on Nauru."
"I wanted to make something on a bigger scale"
Nauru, a 21-square-kilometre Micronesian island country in the Central Pacific, does not have a thriving tourism trade. Before the price leapt to $8,000 in early 2014, the fee for a single-entry media visa was $200. That's an almost 4,000 percent increase. Not exactly keeping with the rate of inflation.
Orner's tight-lipped on the film's content, but you can expect it to encompass Australia's broken international obligations. "Shortly after I arrived back in Australia, Scott Morrison's clinking champagne with the Cambodians, signing a $40 million deal that they're going to take our refugees, again breaking the Refugee Convention, of which we are a signatory to," she says, going on to describe Cambodia's horrific human rights record, as well as its inability to look after refugees, and marvelling at how quick the country was to take "massive amounts of money" to house asylum seekers.
Forty million seems like a lot of money for Australia to fork out, but that figure is just the tip of the iceberg. "The figures from the last year were recently released," Eva says. "About $1.2 billion was spent running Manus, Nauru, and Christmas Island. That's an insane amount of money to spend keeping a few thousand people out of our country and living in appalling conditions."
Perhaps it's these extraordinary numbers that will turn Australians around on this issue, more than the human rights abuses. After all, scare campaigns regarding asylum seekers have often focused on economic impacts: that these interlopers will either steal our jobs or leach off the government. Surely the extraordinary cost of turning people away would galvanise the population.
"The thing is that even the most disinterested person in this issue will be interested in what it's costing them. It's like your schools and your roads are suffering because we're locking up a few thousand people on an island."
The reality of the impact on the economy is often the opposite of how it's portrayed, Orner points out, referring to a news story out of Nhill, a country town in Victoria that has seen an influx of immigrants from Burma. "They've taken 160 refugees over the last 10 years into this rural country town that was dying," she says. "They've propped up this business that was dying, they've injected $140 million into the community. Everyone loves them. It's completely turned the community around, and the entire rural Australia could be benefiting."
In 2008, Eva and director Alex Gibney beat Michael Moore to the Oscar when Taxi to the Dark Side won over Sicko. I suggest to Orner that Moore's strongly opinionated films such as Bowling For Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11 have changed the way issue-based documentaries are received; thanks to him, the media want to know if a doco leans to the left or the right before it's even released.
"I think at the minute there's not a difference between right and left in Australian politics, so it doesn't matter." Orner laughs. "The Labor Party's policies in terms of refugees, asylum, detention, breaking the Refugee Convention, not adhering to the UN, reducing international aid, towing back boats to Indonesia… they're kind of the same. I don't think it's a left or right film."
Pondering this point, she adds: "I think people are really hard on Tony Abbott. I'm happy to say I'm a massive non-fan of the man on every level, but I don't think he's really done anything that different from a Labor government if they were in power."
Orner's film was originally called Bloody UnAustralian, which was a term she enjoyed and figured would be great lightning rod to attract financing. But during post-production, it changed. "In terms of a global film, it's too parochial. And it just hit me recently that we should call it Asylum, which I think resonates globally."
The director has been keeping her expectations for Asylum in check. "It's always tricky, with these types of docos. You hear a lot of people say 'I want to change policy', but I'm very realistic. I've been doing this a long time. I'm always happy if you can elevate the conversation, change one person's mind, change a hundred people's minds. But honestly, I'd love to be able to get people more aware of facts that are out there. I'd love it to play well internationally, so more people know what's happening here, put a bit of shame on Australia, a bit of political pressure.
"I think what we're doing is appalling."