by JOANNE LAURIER
The Australian television drama, Stateless, is now showing on Netflix. Actress Cate Blanchett co-created the six-segment series with Tony Ayres and Elise McCredie. Emma Freeman and Jocelyn Moorhouse each directed three episodes.
Partly inspired by the real-life story of Cornelia Rau, an Australian permanent resident who was unlawfully detained under the Australian government’s mandatory detention program, the program lifts the lid on the brutality not only of that country’s immigration policies but those of every capitalist government.
Through their prosecution of bloody colonial wars, the imperialist ruling elites are responsible for the massive refugee crisis. Stateless deals specifically with the wrongful incarceration and deportation of persecuted immigrants mostly from war zones, the denial of elementary medical and psychiatric care to detainees and the cruel and inhuman punishment of inmates in isolation cells.
In a parched, desolate part of Australia, a primitive immigration center called Barton houses displaced refugees, dubbed UNCs or “unlawful noncitizens.” The exception is the Rau-inspired character, Sofie (Yvonne Strahovski), a former flight attendant and victim of a cult, who seems to have been sexually abused by its sinister leader (Dominic West—Blanchett plays his enabling wife). In a state of mental collapse following her expulsion from the predatory group, Sophie lands at Barton.
Living in squalor, the inmates have wrenching stories. One old man sits stoically with his suitcase in the middle of the courtyard waiting for a legal admittance to Australia that never comes. The simple demands of two Tamils protesting on a blazing hot roof are never met. As one young woman is being dragged out of Barton and slated for deportation, she cries out: “I am Kurdish. I was raped and tortured in Iran. I will survive your torture here. What is my crime?” Out of despair, some detainees have been scratching away at a tunnel under the barbed-wire fences.
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