antipopper

Saw a couple of great films at the Sydney Arab Film Festival: Duraid Lanham‘s Al Hodoud (Borders) and Saverio Costanzo’s Private. Al Hodoud follows a man who has lost his passport and is thus consigned to a whacky bureaucratic netherzone — basically, the kind of story Spielberg botched with The Terminal. (It also costarred the incomparable Raghda.) However, I thought it was absolutely bizarre that the Lord Mayor of Parramatta, in his official welcome to the screening, had the temerity — especially in such a context — to suggest that in Australia, we had built a nation that was largely without borders! Um, did I miss the bit in in 1994 where a Minister from your faction of the Australian Labor Party oversaw the mandatory and indefinite detention of asylum seekers who arrive without papers, Mr Mayor? Or the bit ten (unrepentant) years later, when your Shadow Minister for Immigration, also from your faction, basically told refugee advocates that they, unlike his unfortunate self, didn’t actually have to live with refugees, otherwise they’d change their minds about them? A borderless Australia? Jesus Fucking Christ, mate.

Oh, and Private — a harrowing account of a Palestinian family sticking it out under an Israeli Defence Force confiscation of their house — really got me thinking about the domesticities of occupation. Terrifying.

[ tags: australia, australian-labor-party, border-control, borders, film, immigration, mandatory-detention, occupation, palestine ]