A reflection on Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time

Janet Galbraith appears in the film Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time (Behrouz Boochani and Arash Kamali Sarvestani, 2017) and was also instrumental in facilitating the filmmaking process. She is the only Australian featured in the movie and used her privileges as a citizen to smuggle some significant footage from Manus Island to Australia where it was uploaded for codirector Kamali Sarvestani to access. In this paper, Galbraith recounts important features of the filmmaking process by employing different genres and styles of writing: she offers recollections of her time collaborating with Boochani, actors and supporters; her interpretation of the significance of the film; and critical analysis of Manus Island’s colonial history and Australia’s neocolonial machinations. What Galbraith produces here foregrounds issues such as gender, race, privilege and the various structural forms of oppression and exclusion limiting Boochani’s resistance and creative work. Unseen waves wash, the screen is black with white words. An almost static image appears, blue ocean shored by lush green growth. Bells toll, birds fly, and the incongruous sound of a solo cello inserts itself into the scene. Children laugh. The camera pulls back. Wire fences appear. The soundscape for a moment beats as a heart, or perhaps boots. And so the film, Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time (2017), codirected by Behrouz Boochani and Arash Kamali Sarvestani, begins. Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time was filmed on a mobile phone inside Manus prison, in what Researchers against Black Sites term a “black site” that Australia has created in Manus Province, Papua New Guinea (PNG). Its codirector and cinematographer, Kurdish writer, journalist, and now filmmaker, Behrouz Boochani, was and is incarcerated by Australia in this black site under Australia’s punitive policy, Pacific Solution II. Boochani filmed clandestinely inside the prison and then, after April 2016, once the Supreme Court of PNG had ruled the prison unconstitutional and the inmates were able to venture into the nearby town of Lorengau, Boochani filmed beyond the prison’s boundaries. With slow and at times no Internet access on the island, he went to great lengths to send the footage out to Iranian-Dutch filmmaker, editor and codirector, Arash Kamali Sarvestani, living in the Netherlands. The movement of this footage involved various women friends/advocates with citizen privilege who carried it out of PNG to Australia to send to Kamali Sarvestani. The film garnered much interest and was screened internationally in renowned film festivals (Zable). Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time is an unimaginably huge feat. How do I write about a film that I am intimately involved in, not only as (non)actor but as witness to process, as one of those who carried the footage across nation-state borders, as viewer? I feel the heat of the Manus sun, the scents of lush growth and sea, of papaya and sweat move into my body... remembered voices, touch of people I love. Visceral memories.