Netflix's show Stateless and some companion thoughts and figures

.....As you return home, to your home, think of others
(do not forget the people of the camps).
As you sleep and count the stars, think of others
(those who have nowhere to sleep).
As you liberate yourself in metaphor, think of others
(those who have lost the right to speak).
As you think of others far away, think of yourself
(say: “If only I were a candle in the dark”).

from Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish's poem Think of Others, translated from Arabic.

There are 80 million refugees or displaced people in the world right now. The crisis of displaced people was the largest and the most immediate human crisis we had to deal in the 2000s before Covid19 took center-stage. There have been hard-hitting documentaries on the refugee crisis like Fire at Sea, Island of Hungry Ghosts and Lost Boys of Sudan but not many feature films or TV shows.

Stateless - the Australian TV drama series, co-created by Cate Blanchett, Tony Ayres, and Elise McCredle for Australian Broadcasting Corporation is one of the first of its kind. It brings us a fictionalized, inspired-by-true-stories documentation of refugees and asylum seekers at Australia's immigration detention centers (at a particular one called Baxter at Port Augusta) in the mid-aughts.

Making a successful pitch for a TV drama series on displaced people is not an easy task. Sometimes the producers have to depend on the generosity of a Hollywood celebrity to be able to get their series off the ground. Thank you, Cate Blanchett, for giving life-breath to Stateless, acquired by Netflix and now streaming to your living room. Ms. Blanchett is an UNHCR ambassador and she joined the project as an executive producer to secure funding.

One commonality of all the displaced people in the 21st century is, they are not usually white. Most of the displaced people are from Asia, Africa or S. America. In a saner and brighter yesterday, they were regular people doing regular jobs - teachers, engineers, factory workers in their home countries before some political turmoil, mob lords or war decimated their way of life and their children's futures. Forced to flee their homes, their journeys to a better life is often chock-full of unbelievable hardship. These are not the people who have the luxury to 'Netflix and chill' (meme meaning not intended), so a show about them has to be tailored to the people who will make up the audience.

The producers had to make sure that there was something in the TV show that appealed to the white audience - who form the majority of viewership for streaming content in the western world. Stateless opens with a white woman running across the prickly dry Australian outback. She is what the producer Tony Ayers calls a Trojan Horse. The producers made a strategic and deliberate choice to enter into the story with a middle class white Australian woman for the sake of audience (white) who could easily relate to someone like themselves. The character on the run is Sophie Werner (played by an excellent Yvonne Strahovski), a flight attendant. The character is loosely modeled on a real-life person, Cornelia Rau - a white Australian flight attendant who was mistakenly detained for 10 months at Baxter immigration detention facility.

The fact that Stateless got to be made is commendable. It introduces some of Australia's finest immigrant acting talent to a global audience. Fayssal Bazzi, a first-gen Australian immigrant of Lebanese descent plays one of the major roles as an Afghan school teacher who with his family of two daughters and wife tries to seek asylum in Australia. Iranian-Australian actor Phoenix Raei,  Egyptian-Australian actor Helana Sawires and newcomer Afghan-Australian actor Soraya Heidari play some of the important characters in the show. Asher Keddie and Jai Courtney along with Cate Blanchett and Dominic West in brief but impactful roles make up the rest of the cast.

Stateless will make you think of others. Maybe it will even make you cry for them and despair at your helplessness to even light a candle of hope. If you are looking for a companion piece for this drama series there is Immigration Nation, a docu-series on Netflix which is a look into U.S's immigration enforcement and the treatment of asylum seekers at ICE detention centers.

Or you if you want to stay on Down Under and want to see where Australian government went from Baxter (closed in 2008), you can watch the Island of Hungry Ghosts, available on Amazon Prime (US.) It is a documentary about a local trauma counselor and asylum seekers housed at Christmas Island facility. Post 2010 Australia has been moving most of its immigration detention operations to its own offshore Guantanamos for housing asylum seekers and boat people away from mainland. In purgatories like Nauru, Christmas Island and Manus Island even the children are showing signs of giving up on life and exhibiting suicidal behavior.

I leave you with an UNHCR infographic - click here or on the image to open in a new tab. Food for thought or to discard.