"Nowhere Line: Voices from Manus Island" - Trailer

This is an animated doco coming soon, using stories from Asylum seekers in detention. This is Abbott's Australia. Trailer below.

After a successful crowd-funding campaign earlier this year, Lukas Schrank’s short documentary, Nowhere Lines: Voices From Manus Island, is premiering this weekend at the Melbourne International Film Festival; it fleshes out one of these horrific stories using gritty, comic book-style animation. Schrank, a filmmaker who works between London and Melbourne, based the film on a series of phone conversations with two Iranian asylum seekers inside detention centres. The production process was, in part, a covert operation. “The first phone call took around four months to happen, and it came at an unexpected time,” he says. “I had no idea how the interviews were going to turn out.”

The heavy restrictions placed on asylum seekers inside the centres made any communication not only difficult, but dangerous. The two men Schrank had gotten into contact with decided they wanted to be a part of the project, but only under the pseudonyms of Karim and Omar. “They have always been very trusting and supportive. It was initially quite hard to describe the nature of the film to them, they are already in a situation that is surreal and unimaginable,” he says. “So to add the fact that some guy in Australia is animating them, that took a bit of explaining.” Read more