‘Stop the Boats’ Screening and Q&A
Featuring Director, Simon V Kurian, and UNSW Adjunct Associate Professor Behrouz Boochani
UNSW Forced Migration Research Network is honoured to present a free screening of the feature-length documentary ‘Stop the Boats’ directed, filmed and edited by Simon V Kurian. This fully self-funded documentary was the centre piece film at the Human Rights Art and Film Festival in 2019 and tells the story of how Australia used a three word slogan to demonise people seeking asylum, fleeing war and persecution.
The screening will be followed by a Q&A session with the Director, Simon Kurian, and Behrouz Boochani, a Kurdish-Iranian journalist who was detained on Manus for over 6 years and is currently held in Port Moresby and features in the documentary. Boochani is an award-winning writer and was recently appointed Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Social Sciences at UNSW.
About the Film:
‘Stop the Boats’ tells the story of how Australia used a three word slogan to demonise people seeking asylum, fleeing war and persecution, condemning them to offshore detention and torture in prison camps on Manus and Nauru.
The stories are told by asylum seekers including children from within detention centres, secretly filmed on mobile phones and smuggled out from Nauru and Manus Island on USBs, few shots at a time. This is set against interviews with whistle-blower detention centre workers. The harrowing stories of the child abuse and criminal neglect are exposed through this film.
Behrouz Boochani is featured in the film. In 2018 he published his non-fiction book — No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison, which won Australia’s richest literary award, the 2019 Victorian Prize for Literature. The film also features Dr Munjed al Muderis, Julian Burnside QC, Ben Doherty, Phil Glendenning, Dr Ai-Lene Chan, Dr Peter Young, Andrew Wilkie MP and the late Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser.
Trailer: https://vimeo.com/272297499
