3 x 30 mins
With a government elected to ‘Stop The Boats’ and introduce new refugee and asylum seeker policies, the multi-award-winning documentary series “Go Back To Where You Came From” returns for the next stage of its unique social experiment - to challenge the strongly held beliefs of six Australians on a journey to see the world through the eyes of refugees. The series will once again provoke national debate about how Australia responds to this tough and complex global issue.
To investigate the impact of those new policies on refugees and asylum seekers, the stakes have been raised. Most of the participants setting out for the most desperate and dangerous corners of the world, have a connection to the issue. They include a former refugee, two sisters with opposing opinions, a Nauru and Manus island whistle blower and a ‘Stop the Boats’ campaigner.
Australia’s renowned academic on refugees, Dr David Corlett, once again oversees the experiment and begins by confiscating the participants’ passports, wallets and phones. They’re sent to live as guests of refugees living in Australia. One group stays with a Palestinian family resettled from Iraq; the other with a Burmese refugee on a bridging visa. Conflict arises almost immediately when one participant is left alone at the dinner table after the other participants and family members walk out in disgust. And that’s just the beginning of the extraordinary twenty five day journey.
The participants’ then get a first-hand experience of Australia’s ‘turn back the boats’ policy when they’re transferred from a people smuggler’s boat to an orange lifeboat and turned back to Indonesia. Back on shore, they live with asylum seekers in Indonesia who have been turned back by the Australian navy.
One group treks through the Thai jungle to discover how asylum seekers are trafficked and sold into slavery. Participants are shocked to hear a first-hand account from a teenage former prisoner.
The other group meets Syrians asylum seekers near a border crossing. Some of the asylum seekers have been walking for days to escape the ravages of war. Then they visit the world’s newest city – a refugee camp built out of the Jordanian desert and home to more than 80,000.
Both groups visit the relatives of their hosts in Australia - one in a makeshift camp in Bangladesh.
The series builds to a dramatic climax in two of the most dangerous places on Earth. In Syria, participants visit a deserted town overrun by ISIS. Further down the road they are shot at by ISIS insurgents less than two kilometres away.
At the end of the journey the two groups are reunited in Cambodia to assess the impact of their experience. Have their views changed or been confirmed?
