Directed by Paul Burns
Short Film
GET TO THE WIRE
Official Trailer
Synopsis
In a dystopian future, an Australian-Iraqi woman held captive in a chaotic and brutal British immigration detention centre adopts severe measures to survive and reconnect with her estranged family.
Character Biographies
Judy
Use this space to introduce yourself and share your professional history.
Judy is a 28-year-old refugee from Australia, who is being indefinitely held in a British detention centre while separated from her dying father and son. Judy is resilient, resourceful, and focused, but the inhumane conditions of the detention centre are becoming difficult to bear. When released from one month of solitary confinement, Judy enacts a plan to call her father, who is caring for her son, to make sure her father and son are still alive. Judy’s best friend in the detention centre is Livia.
Livia
Use this space to introduce yourself and share your professional history.
Livia is a 23-year-old refugee, who has grown up isolated from her family in different detention centres. Livia is a caring and wise person, with an uncommonly strong sense of self, but as the years disappear she is becoming reluctant to endure life. While Livia mostly keeps to herself, writing to pass the time, she shares a close bond with Judy. Livia has spent far more time in detention centres than Judy, and does her best to look out for Judy’s safety and wellbeing.
Director's Statement
The idea behind 'Get to the Wire' was to offer a response against the dehumanising language used to justify Australia’s cruellest immigration policies. During the 2019-20 Australian "Black Summer" bushfires, the possibility of Australians becoming environmental refugees was also on my mind. I decided to set the film in a future immigration detention centre with an Australian protagonist, to show how our future could be influenced by our current policies.
Being relatively distant to immigration issues, extensive research, collaboration and conversations were crucial to ensuring emotional truths were on-screen. Through this collaborative process, it felt more and more important to make a film with personal focus and artistic intent, rather than an exhausted and polemic indictment of detention centres.
The resulting film is an exploration of what it means to show care in an environment which is designed to divide and isolate people. While the film foregrounds the resilience of human connections through hardship, it doesn't offer answers about how we should respond to crises. But I hope it promotes important conversations and personal reflection about Australia's current immigration policies, and how exercising care for ourselves and others connects us to a common humanity.