All my faith in humanity was destroyed by Chasing Asylum: Inside Australia’s Detention Camps (BBC4 Storyville, 9pm), a deeply shocking documentary directed by Academy award-winning filmmaker Eva Orner (Orner produced Alex Gibney’s Taxi to the Dark Side). It filled me with rage and broke my heart. Focusing on the human cost of Australia’s hardline policy of offshore detention, it takes us inside camps on Nauru and Manus where men, women, children and babies are detained indefinitely and no cameras or journalists are allowed. All footage was filmed secretly. And what unconscionable horrors it exposes.
Like the support worker who recalls seeing a sign about training staff to use a Hoffman knife, asking why, and being told it is to cut people down when they’re found hanging. Or the repurposed second-world-war tin shed used to detain people in sweltering, squalid conditions. The detainees setting themselves on fire, stitching lips and eyelids shut. The allegations of physical and sexual abuse of children. The babies “failing to thrive”. The graffiti scrawled above a line of payphones saying ‘“kill us”’. The fact that all this is being done as a deterrent, “to make this place as horrible as possible” as one ashamed ex-director of Nauru detention centre puts it, in order to put refugees off from seeking asylum in Australia. To “stop the boats”, as the slogan goes.
Chasing Asylum is one of the most important, distressing and necessarily relentless documentaries I have seen this year. The others are the unforgettable trio of BBC films, Exodus, made using hidden cameras given to refugees crossing Europe. That secret filming was required in both cases shows how badly those in power do not want these stories told. I can see why: together these documentaries form the most damning indictment imaginable of the way we treat people in desperate need. Everyone, but especially those in power endorsing the policies that make such living hells possible, should watch them.
