About the film
Island of the Hungry Ghosts is a 2018 documentary by Australian director Gabrielle Brady. It's set on Christmas Island, in the Indian Ocean, and follows trauma counsellor Poh Lin Lee through her work with detained asylum seekers, her family life and the island around her.
| The film at a glance | |
|---|---|
| Director and writer | Gabrielle Brady |
| Running time | 98 minutes |
| Language | English |
| Countries | Germany, United Kingdom, Australia |
| Production | Chromosom Film, Third Films, echotango, Various Films |
| World premiere | Tribeca Film Festival, April 2018 |
| Main award | Best Documentary Feature, Tribeca 2018 |
The story
Millions of red crabs cross Christmas Island every year on their way from the jungle to the sea. In the same jungle, hidden from view, there's a high-security detention centre. The asylum seekers inside don't know how long they'll be held.
Poh Lin is the person they talk to. She listens, session after session, and then goes home to her own family. The film keeps both worlds in the frame: the therapy room and the beach, the fence and the forest.
Meanwhile local families prepare their hungry ghost offerings, for the dead who never got a proper burial. Nobody in the film says it outright, but the ghosts start to look a lot like the people in the centre.
An island closer to Java than to Perth
Christmas Island is small. About 135 square kilometres, and 63% of it is national park.
It lies roughly 350 km south of Java and about 1,550 km from the Australian mainland. The island became Australian territory in 1958. Around 1,700 people live there (2021 census), and many families have Chinese or Malay roots. That's why the hungry ghost rituals are part of ordinary island life, not a tourist show.
The crab migration usually comes between October and December. For the film it meant one long night of shooting.
Poh Lin Lee and the sand tray
Poh Lin is a social worker and narrative therapist. For three years from 2011 she worked for the Christmas Island Torture and Trauma Service, seeing asylum seekers referred from the detention centre.
In many scenes she uses sandplay: a shallow box of sand and shelves of small figures. People who can't put what happened to them into words build it instead.
Towards the end of 2013 the rules kept changing. People she'd been seeing for months were moved to Manus Island or Nauru, and usually she never found out what happened to them.
How it was made
Gabrielle and Poh Lin had been friends for about ten years. Gabrielle first came to the island as a visitor while she was living in Indonesia. On her last day, Poh Lin showed her the detention centre hidden in the jungle.
She kept coming back, and the film took four years in all. A few things about the shoot:
- the crew on the island was three people: Gabrielle, cinematographer Michael Latham and sound recordist Leo Dolgan;
- they shot on an ARRI Alexa Mini, picked because it's light enough to carry through the jungle;
- for the crab migration they worked through the night, with a camera dolly built from old roller-skate wheels;
- Aaron Cupples wrote the score mostly for huge stretched wire instruments, bowed and vibrated with electromagnets.
Premiere and after
The film premiered at Tribeca in April 2018 and won the festival's award for best documentary feature. At IDFA in Amsterdam it picked up the human rights award. The full list is on the reviews and awards page.
It then opened in cinemas in the UK, Australia, North America and Germany. In 2020 it was nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the Independent Spirit Awards.
The detention centre on Christmas Island closed in late 2018, a few months after the premiere. It reopened in February 2019.