Five years ago, Gabrielle Brady, an Australian film-maker, decided to visit an old friend who had moved to remote Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean. The tiny tropical Australian territory was only settled a century ago, when phosphate, deposited as guano by seabirds, was mined by Chinese and Malay labourers. Its latest industry, however, was the controversial “offshore processing” of refugees. For the past 17 years, asylum seekers reaching Australia’s shores by boat have been dispatched to island detention centres and detained there indefinitely.
Brady’s arrival on holiday gave her friend, Poh Lin Lee, a break from her difficult job on Christmas Island, providing therapy for traumatised detainees. “We spent two weeks enjoying this beautiful environment – diving with dolphins, looking for whale sharks, going to really remote beaches,” remembers Brady, who now lives in Berlin. “At the end, Poh said: ‘I need to show you something.’” They slashed their way through dense jungle with machetes (“everywhere you go on Christmas Island, you need a machete”) to reach a lookout. Below spread the grey buildings of the huge camp for refugees. “It was just truly shocking,” says Brady. “I’d seen that image so many times in the Australian media, but I’d forgotten it existed.”
This revelatory mix of horror and beauty – and Lee’s growing reservations about her job – drove Brady to return to the island five times over the next four years, making her powerful, discombobulating debut feature, Island of the Hungry Ghosts. Instead of a familiar focus on the life stories of traumatised refugees, Brady’s film is a lyrical, dream-like journey into darkness. It offers no contextual information via voiceover or even captions; instead, the camera lingers on brooding rainforest, the spooky dinosaur-like rattle of tropical birds, and the extraordinary migrating land crabs (whose respectful treatment by the island authorities contrasts with that of the human arrivals).
The film’s core is Lee’s life and therapeutic work as one of four counsellors employed by Australia’s department of health at the island hospital. The film started small, she says, when she and Brady decided they wanted to secretly document detainees’ stories. Brady met them inside Lee’s consulting room, unbeknown to the guards posted outside the door, and gauged their willingness to be filmed. Although by agreeing they risked punishment or being transferred to other island camps, “there was huge interest,” says Brady. “I was meeting people who had been there for four or five years. There was a huge sense of desperation.”
It was dangerous for Lee as well, with the Australian government having introduced a draconian law threatening whistleblowers with two years’ imprisonment. Lee took the chance. “It was far more important to document the stories at that stage,” she says, by phone from Nice, where she now lives with her French husband and two children. “The risk I faced was nowhere near what the asylum seekers risked.”
In therapy with Lee, refugees from Afghanistan, Somalia and elsewhere discuss their treatment in detention, rather than the conflicts they have fled – a deliberate decision to avoid re-traumatising them. She worries about the impact on them of being constantly asked to retell their “trauma story”. “When I discussed these concerns with Gabrielle we realised it wasn’t the kind of storytelling we wanted to invite. We offered therapeutic work and if something came out that would contribute to the film, that was secondary.”
In fact, Brady ended up filming more extensively only once some asylum seekers had been transferred to the Australian mainland. She and Lee felt their subjects could offer fully informed consent once they had access to legal advice, unmonitored emails and more personal freedom. These scenes, Brady insists, are not re-enactments but a continuation of Lee’s therapeutic work. “At times we were filming in retrospect but the moment itself, particularly the therapy sessions, are very genuine. I haven’t touched them as a director. It worked creatively and it was the only way to have done it with real permission,” she says.
The film also follows Lee into intimate corners of her family life as she struggles with her participation in the system that is abusing them. Family camping trips in Christmas Island’s national park look idyllic but are suffused with foreboding. How did Lee experience life in such a strange place? “When we first went there, it was quite sparkly and enticing. I’ve never swum on coral reefs that are completely undamaged. As we were there longer and started to realise that none of the Chinese or Malay community would leave the village area after dark, then we understood more about the history. There was this new layer of heaviness. At the end, I had a sense that the island holds so many lost, wandering spirits.”
The film’s digressions into island folklore frustrated one critic, who labelled it “an all-too-pretty but information-deficient documentary”. Audiences with no knowledge of the well-established cruelty of Australia’s refugee policy – condemned by the UN and Amnesty International but with widespread support in Australia, and maintained by all main political parties – will not learn many facts from the film.
But Brady wanted not merely to show her audience the refugee story; she wanted them to feel it. The film’s opacity and slow pace throw viewers into a state of uncertainty that mirrors – very mildly, of course – the plight of incarcerated refugees. “I wanted to dislocate the audience – you don’t know where you are until a certain point in the film,” she says. “Cinema is like a trip that you are taken on. I wanted it to be a sensorial experience. That’s what implants something inside you – not information and context.”
It was hard to sell this vision. Brady worked for four years unpaid, living in a caravan in Berlin. “It was difficult to pitch the project avoiding this box that it would be a refugee film – an information-driven exposé. It was hard for people to grapple with.” She only received a small amount of funding in Australia – from Screen Territory – and eventually funded the film in Europe and also produced a more informative short film for the Guardian). Both Brady and Lee give the impression of being exiles from their home country. “Australia is a politically suffocated place at the moment,” says Brady. “I don’t feel welcome.”
The Christmas Island detention centre was quietly closed last October. Since filming, one refugee has published a book of poetry and others are training to be dentists and lawyers; nevertheless, all but one of more than 20 detainees who appear in the film remain in limbo on temporary visas, unsure if they will be allowed a future in Australia. Brady made an Australian edit concealing their faces because she fears they could still be “persecuted” by authorities. Setting aside the abuse, both Brady and Lee view indefinite detention as a disastrous own-goal for Australia. “I was meeting people at the top of their game – incredibly smart, multilingual,” says Brady. “These would be the sorts of people you would want in your country.”
Lee, who now works with refugees in European countries including Turkey and Greece, is sure the system worsens trauma. “People process and recover by re-engaging in life, relationships, hopes and dreams. When people arrived on Christmas Island, they had come from unspeakable horror, but they were alive and engaged. Had they been welcomed into a community and given opportunities to work, we wouldn’t see these intensive ongoing effects of trauma. We’re creating a whole community of people who will be dependent on mental health services for the rest of their lives.”
• Island of the Hungry Ghosts is released on 11 January in the UK, and 7 March in Australia
