Dendy Cinemas and Green Left Weekly have teamed up to bring cinema audiences in Melbourne (May 6-8) and Brisbane (May 13-15) a festival of John Pilger films featuring all of the well-know radical journalist and film maker's documentaries. The highlight of the festivals will be premiere screenings in these cities of Pilger's new documentary Stealing a Nation, which exposes British and US government complicity in the illegal expulsion of the inhabitants of the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia to make way for a US military base. Green Left Weekly's Marce Cameron spoke to Pilger about his latest film.
"It's a great injustice in its own right and it's a metaphor for more widespread injustices, for how the world is ordered", Pilger said. "It was the expulsion of an entire population over perhaps 10 years by British governments in order to give all of the Chagos islands to the US for a military base. From that base, American planes have attacked Afghanistan and Iraq. It's probably the most important American base outside continental US."
Were there any special challenges involved in making this film?
No, the film centres on a series of interviews with exiled Chagos islanders in Mauritius, and on documents which we found in the public records office in London and the national archives in Washington. The film draws these two elements together and it's a very powerful mixture, because on the one hand we have the victims of this crime speaking movingly and eloquently about what happened to them, and on the other we have those who perpetrated the crime, mostly British officials in the 1960s and early 1970s, describing in their own words their intentions and how they executed the depopulation of a British colony against international law.
How do you think your film has been received so far?
The public response has been encouraging, as always. It's going to be screened on TV again in the UK in July and that's very unusual. My documentaries are shown on the ITV network which, as a rule, doesn't repeat documentaries. The public response was to get in touch with us — hundreds of people, wanting to do something. Another encouraging response was that a number of senior lawyers and judges got in touch with us wanting to help.
Since the film was shown — the film undoubtedly contributed to this — the High Court in the UK has agreed to a judicial review of the royal prerogative which the Blair government used to banish Chagos islanders permanently. Documentaries can have at best an insidious positive effect. They can help to place an issue on an international agenda. That's what seems to have happened in this case.
What do you think the impact of your films has been over the years?
All of my films have been shown in the so-called mainstream so I've been able to build up support in a general audience. So even though these days they're broadcast fairly late at night in the UK, they still have an audience of around 2 million people and of course that audience increases as the films are shown on TV around the world, then shown on video and DVD. I think they're able to engage with a fairly wide audience, and I think that's important. Quite a few of the people who watch them are informed and persuaded of certain facts and truths perhaps for the first time. For me, that's the most important goal I can aim for with my documentaries — informing people, increasing public awareness. That's all I can hope to do, and if there's some kind of change [as a result], as has happened with my Cambodia and East Timor films, I regard that as a bonus.
To give you an idea of the kind of interest in these films, on the last night of a festival in Sydney at the Valhalla about 50 people couldn't get in, they had to be turned away. I'm hoping for something similar at the Dendy in Melbourne and Brisbane. From my point of view these are very important screenings.
[For ticket prices, bookings and session times contact Dendy Cinemas or Green Left Weekly in Melbourne (phone 9639 8622) or in Brisbane (phone 3831 2644).]
From Green Left Weekly, April 27, 2005.
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