The ABC’s gripping six-part series Stateless begins in the middle of nowhere, a combination of drone and ground shots capturing a hysterical woman running across sun-scorched desert in desperate search of, or escape from ... what? It’s a classic “how did we get here?” opening, forcing the audience to ask fundamental questions which we assume will be answered in due course.
This scene is arresting before it gets to the kicker: the surreal sight of a bright red balloon appearing out of nowhere and drifting across the frame. The question suddenly changes from “how did she get here?” to “how is this possible?”
By the end of the series (no spoilers) you could argue these questions have been answered completely, just as you could argue they haven’t been answered at all – a testament to the show’s curious mixture of nail-biting verisimilitude and psychologically charged aesthetic.
Focused predominantly on four strangers from various backgrounds, all entering new chapters in their lives, Stateless brings them into the same physical space – an Australian immigration detention centre – while exploring the circumstances that starkly differentiate them.
But just when you think you’ve got Stateless pegged, pow! Co-directors Emma Freeman (whose work includes Glitch and Tidelands) and Jocelyn Moorhouse (Proof, The Dressmaker, Les Norton) take us somewhere else, oscillating between the four key narrative chunks of Elise McCredie and Belinda Chayko’s cleverly scrambled, nonlinear screenplay.
It’s a pedigree production, that’s for sure, and looks set to receive a significant international audience – its global rights outside Australia were recently acquired by Netflix. The series was co-created by Tony Ayres, Elise McCredie and Cate Blanchett – who is also an executive producer and appears as the co-leader of a cult, to which Sofie (Yvonne Strahovski) is lured.
Sofie is the woman in that balloon-in-the-desert kick-off. In the very next scene we see her at an earlier time, working as a flight attendant, smiling as she scans her passport before boarding a plane. This is an important point, made so briefly you might miss it: Sofie is an Australian citizen. She will nevertheless soon end up in Barton immigration detention centre (another mystery to add to the collection), the crux around which the drama orbits.
Other main characters include an Afghan man, Ameer (Fayssal Bazzi), who travels to Indonesia to seek passage to Australia but is separated from his family and duped out of money by a people smuggler; Cam Sandford (Jai Courtney), a newly employed guard uncomfortable with what he sees on the inside; and bureaucrat Clare Kowitz (Asher Keddie), the centre’s new general manager, whose tasks include dealing with heightened media scrutiny – partly generated by a protest conducted by Tamil detainees. There are rumours of more uprisings on the horizon.
The first episode contains a compelling example of parallel editing, using the visual motif of the ocean to connect Ameer and Sofie’s disparate situations. Cinematographer Bonnie Elliott’s wobbly, slightly washed-out, rough-hewn aesthetic pushes the series’ many fine performances to the fore; it is very much an ensemble drama.
The face of Bazzi, swollen with sadness, will linger with you: he is great as Ameer – a principled, intelligent but desperate person, caught in a situation impossible to out-manoeuvre. Courtney does the “decent but susceptible bloke” thing very convincingly, serving as a proxy for the audience: asking us to what extent we might maintain or shed our own humanity in a similar situation.
Strahovski gets the meatiest arc as Sofie, her journey tied not just to political and bureaucratic situations but a mental illness, the development of which is stretched out over the show’s lengthy running time. This patient, big-thinking approach is reflected in other tangents – such as Ameer’s dramatic backstory, the precise details of it remaining a mystery until more or less the end.
Detention centres remain underexplored in Australian film and TV. Is there a location that better represents the values of ruling class Australia? Is there another kind of location that more honestly depicts the ethics of leaders such as Scott Morrison – a devout Christian who nevertheless has a desk adorned with a metal boat trophy celebrating the number of desperate and impoverished asylum seekers he “stopped” under his watch?
The show’s title obviously refers to its characters. But perhaps from a moral point of view it might refer to everybody living here, with the exception of Indigenous Australians, in this sunbaked former penal colony: a nation with a genocidal history where sovereignty was never ceded, a treaty never drawn, and where contempt for the sick, huddled and needy became a popular political catchphrase (“stop the boats”). Maybe the “real” Australia only exists in the shadow of barbed wire and fortress walls.
Perhaps the film-makers intended us to think about this; perhaps not. There’s certainly a lot to contemplate – though Stateless is not some dry cerebral experience. The drama comes alive. It’s gripping; it’s thrilling; it hurts.