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Events

Kurdish Film Screening and Talk with Directors/ Centre for Kurdish Studies

'Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time'

Centre for Kurdish Studies and the Kurdish Society are pleased to present the film, 'Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time', a documentary film co-directed by the Kurdish-Iranian refugee Behrouz Boochani and the Netherlands-based Iranian filmmaker Arash Kamali Sarvestani. Boochani shot the film inside Australia's Manus Island detention centre in Papua New Guinea. The film was shot on a smartphone, which Boochani had to hide from the prison authorities. Following the film, we will also have the chance to talk online with the film's co-directors.


Event details

About Boochani;

Associate Professor Behrouz Boochani graduated from Tarbiat Moallem University and Tarbiat Modares University, both in Tehran; he holds a Masters degree in political science, political geography and geopolitics. Behrouz is a Kurdish-Iranian writer, journalist, scholar, cultural advocate and filmmaker. He was a writer for the Kurdish language magazine Werya; is Associate Professor in Social Sciences at UNSW; non-resident Visiting Scholar at the Sydney Asia Pacific Migration Centre (SAPMiC), University of Sydney; Honorary Member of PEN International; and winner of an Amnesty International Australia 2017 Media Award, the Diaspora Symposium Social Justice Award, the Liberty Victoria 2018 Empty Chair Award, and the Anna Politkovskaya award for journalism. He publishes regularly with The Guardian, and his writing also features in The Saturday Paper, Huffington Post, New Matilda, The Financial Timesand The Sydney Morning Herald. Boochani is also co-director (with Arash Kamali Sarvestani) of the 2017 feature-length filmChauka, Please Tell Us The Time; and collaborator on Nazanin Sahamizadeh's play Manus. Boochani's book, No Friend But The Mountains: Writing From Manus Prison won the 2019 Victorian Prize for Literature in addition to the Nonfiction category. He has also won the Special Award at the NSW Premier's Literary Awards, the Australian Book Industry Award for Nonfiction Book of the Year, and the National Biography Prize. It has been published in 18 languages in 23 countries and is currently being adapted for both stage and screen. Behrouz has been appointed adjunct associate professor in the faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of NSW and visiting professor at Birkbeck Law School at the University of London. He was a political prisoner incarcerated by the Australian government in Papua New Guinea for almost seven years. In November 2019 Behrouz escaped to New Zealand. He now resides in Wellington, New Zealand.

About Arash Kamali Sarvestani;

Arash Kamali Sarvestani is an Iranian Filmmaker. In 2009 he moved to The Netherlands to study Fine Art in Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, and he has lived there since then. In 2016 and after two years of investigation into refugees kept by the Australian government in Manus and NauruArash eventually found Behrouz Boochani, who was detained in the Manus camp. The first feature movie of Arash “Chauka, Please tell us the time” is a result of their cooperation.

Location:

IAIS Building/LT2