Behrouz Boochani’s story is not unusual – and that’s precisely what makes it so tragic. The Iranian journalist and hero of Arash Sarvestani’s new documentary Chauka, Please Tell Us The Time has been imprisoned at Manus Island for almost half a decade, and the story of how he got there is full of the kind of violence, tragedy and heartbreak that unites the tales of so many of those held at the internment centre.
“[Boochani] was a journalist in Iran and worked for some newspapers like Kasbokar and Werya,” Sarvestani explains. “The Iranian Sepāh agency— in English, people call them the Revolutionary Guards – arrested some of his friends from Werya because they were promoting Kurdish language and culture, and he had to leave Iran because he was in danger.
“He left Iran in May 2013 and went to Indonesia. He was there for about four months. Behrouz did not feel safe there because there was the constant danger that the police could arrest him and deport him to Iran. He tried to reach Australia twice. The first time the boat sank, and he survived only because he could reach a piece of wood from the boat. A fishing boat rescued him from the water, but he was taken back to Indonesia where the police put him in jail.
“Behrouz managed to escape from the jail, and after two weeks tried to go to Australia by boat again. That time their boat got lost on the ocean for a week before a British ship saved them. He arrived in Australia on the 23rd of July 2013, which is his birthday. Behrouz was on Christmas Island for about a month before they exiled him to Manus Island. He’s been there ever since.”
Chauka is comprised entirely of footage that Boochani shot himself on his mobile phone, and he is credited as the film’s co-director. “The movie went through more than 30 edits and I showed all of them to Behrouz,” Sarvestani explains. “I would upload the edits in a private link for him to watch, which took a time, because of the really low internet speed in the camp. Then [Boochani] would pass back ideas about the edit. We would talk more about the story and I would send another version of edit to him, and again he could see how the story could be developed. So, step by step the story developed, and step by step I became a detainee in that jail as well, and step by step Behrouz became a great filmmaker.”
For Sarvestani and Boochani, it soon became apparent that the film was not going to work like other documentaries. Nor did they want it to. With its strange, blurry cell phone footage, tragic narrative and strange, muted sense of hope, Chauka was designed to be more like a poem or a painting than anything else.
Step by step I became a detainee in that jail as well, and step by step Behrouz became a great filmmaker.
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“When you first hear a poem, the feeling you get depends on your verbal knowledge, political knowledge, historical knowledge and your artistic knowledge. All those kinds of knowledge allow you to go through further layers of that poem, so you can explore the metaphors. We wanted the film to work the same way.”
Nonetheless, despite all that Sarvestani has learnt while making Chauka, still one question remains unanswered: he has no idea why Australians seem so numbed to the horror stories emerging from the offshore prison their government uses tax dollars to maintain.
“Maybe I should ask you,” he says. “You better know your own society. It is strange for me that all these things are happening in a democratic country like Australia.”
Chauka, Please Tell Us The Time screens at Event Cinemas George St on Sunday June 11 and Thursday June 15 as part of the Sydney Film Festival.
