Chasing Asylum

Chasing Asylum
ISBN: 9781460751930
Publication Date: 26 April 2016

'My work as a filmmaker has taken me to some wild, dangerous places. I've filmed in Iran, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Indonesia, Cambodia and more. It's been a crazy, peripatetic kind of life, taking me to war zones or desperately poor, chaotic, unstable countries. I've been sick, injured, scared and had too many close calls to mention.I spend a lot of time alone, in airports, lugging camera gear, gazing up at flickering departure boards. But I love it. I love the feeling I get when I am heading into the unknown. All I want to do is tell the important stories.'

Personal, gripping and compelling, this memoir documents Australian filmmaker Eva Orner's behind-the-scenes journey making of her Chasing Asylum documentary on Australia's treatment of asylum seekers.

Feeling angry and disappointed with Australia's refugee policies and practices, the Oscar and Emmy award-winning filmmaker returned to Australia from a decade living in the States to make a documentary about what she describes as Australia's 'woefully inadequate' treatment of asylum seekers. Embarking on a tumultuous eighteen months, Eva filmed in Indonesia, Cambodia, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Iran - where, if she'd been caught filming, she would have been hanged - and spoke to everyone from asylum seekers to politicians, from activists to commentators, from David Marr to Malcolm Fraser, from returned refugees in Iran to would-be refugees in Afghanistan. She smuggled a pen camera into an Indonesian jail to interview a convicted people smuggler, she interviewed whistleblowers in Australia, and in Iran she spoke to the family of a man who was killed in the Manus Island riots.

Chasing Asylum, her memoir, is a very personal story of the cost, risks and rewards of putting yourself on the line for a film and for a cause - and also an insightful, provocative, c...