The Spring 2021 Menzies Screening series launches with a vital documentary co-directed by Kurdish-Iranian refugee Behrouz Boochani and Netherlands-based Iranian filmmaker Arash Kamali Sarvestani, who will join us after the film for a live Q&A.

Chauka, Please Tell Us The Time offers a first-person perspective on Australia’s controversial immigration detention facility on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island. An imprisoned Boochani strives to gather information for an Australian journalist, as part of an investigation into a solitary confinement cell called Chauka, a prison inside the prison. Shooting in secret on a smartphone over a period of six months, Boochani captures life inside Manus and interviews fellow detainees about their experiences.

This online screening is free and open to all (including audiences outside the UK), and will take place live and online via Eventive. It will be followed by a live Q&A with the filmmakers, Behrouz Boochani and Arash Kamali Sarvestani, chaired by Menzies Screenings curator Stephen Morgan and Menzies co-director Béatrice Bijon. If you miss the live session, there will also be an opportunity to watch the film and recorded Q&A for a limited period after the event.

About the Panelists

Behrouz Boochani is a Kurdish-Iranian writer, journalist, scholar, cultural advocate and filmmaker. A political prisoner incarcerated by the Australian government in Papua New Guinea for almost seven years, he is the co-director (with Arash Kamali Sarvestani) of Chauka, Please Tell Us The Time (2017), and the author of the multi-award winning No Friend but the Mountains: Writing From Manus Prison (Picador 2018).

Arash Kamali Sarvestani is an Iranian Dutch Filmmaker and Video Artist. He studied cinema at the Art University of Tehran, and Video Art at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. In 2015, he participated in Abbas Kiarostami's film-making workshop in Barcelona in 2015, where he came up with the idea of making a film from inside a refugee camp. His resulting collaboration with Manus Island detainee Behrouz Boochani, Chauka, Please Tell Us The Time (2017), was his first feature-length film.

Béatrice Bijon is a scholar of English literature and women’s history, based in Canberra at the Australian National University as a Senior Lecturer. She is presently Co-Director of the Menzies Australia Institute. In her native France she taught at the University of Saint-Etienne, Lyon. Her present projects include work on the memorialisation of women’s activism, the life-work partnership of the photographer Axel Poignant and visual anthropologist Roslyn Poignant and the fiction of Alexis Wright.

Stephen Morgan is a film programmer and academic whose research focuses on the cultural history of British and Australian cinema and the broader intersections of Empire and nation within settler and Indigenous cinemas. As well as serving as the Screenings Coordinator for the Menzies Australia Institute, he is also the Co-Programmer of the London Australian Film Society & Festival.