MARY MEETS MOHAMMAD: Documentary directed, produced and written by Heather Kirkpatrick. Rated PG. 80 min.
Review by Paul Dobbyn
HOW would we react to news that a detention centre for asylum seekers was going to be built in our neighbourhood?
Even more interestingly, how might our attitudes change if we had the opportunity to meet these same asylum seekers?
Mary Meets Mohammad, a well-crafted and engrossing documentary by film producer Heather Kirkpatrick, presents some possible answers to these perplexing questions.
Such questions have particular salience as Australia heads for an election in which both major political parties are engaged in a race to the bottom to prove their fitness not so much to run the country as to “stop the boats”.
The documentary, one of four finalists for Outstanding Documentary Talent Award for 2013, is set in Pontville, a community on the outskirts of Hobart within the Brighton municipality.
Tasmania’s first detention centre for asylum seekers was built and opened there in 2011.
Mary Meets Mohammad opens with a NIMBY moment – a public meeting where residents from Brighton community angrily denounce the impending opening of the asylum-seeker centre.
We see the situation through a range of viewpoints both during the public meeting and as the film progresses.
Some of these viewpoints no doubt we’ve overheard or held ourselves.
Farmers in the country around Pontville angrily discuss the luxury in which these “queue jumpers” will be living.
We see a young mother who’s concerned about the detained asylum seekers somehow endangering the safety of her children as they play. Yet, there are dissenters.
One indignant man shows concern for those to be incarcerated in the new facility with the comment: “As soon as they lock the gate the place becomes a concentration camp.”
Then there’s Mary, from whom the documentary draws part of its title. After the public meeting, she fulminates against the asylum seekers’ arrival in Pontville, warning “they’ll get all our pension money” and that “they’re a pack of heathens”.
She’s also a member of the local Bridgewater Knitting Club.
We catch up with Mary after the detention centre has been opened. About 400 male asylum seekers are being held inside and the club is knitting beanies for the detainees as winter approaches.
In a sense, the beanie-knitting is a symbol for the women’s attitude to the asylum seekers.
Some volunteers eagerly embrace the task as a way to show solidarity with the detainees.Others, Mary for example, think differently.
Ashamedly, she later reveals to Mohammad, her comments to fellow knitting club members at the time.
“I didn’t want to knit any beanies for the asylum seekers because I didn’t know what you were like,” she says to him.
When the detention centre closes after six months some of the refugees decide to settle in Hobart and the knitters stay in contact with them.
Mary and Mohammad have become good friends; more than that, they’re almost family with the young man saying she’s like his grandmother.
We come to understand why the young Hazara man had fled Pakistan.
His situation had become too dangerous. The Taliban had already killed his two older brothers and he was most probably next.
Documentary-maker Heather Kirkpatrick, in an effortlessly natural way, unfolds the development of the friendship between the elderly Australian and the young Afghani asylum seeker.
She also eschews preaching which adds to the documentary’s power as a teaching tool.
Events and opinions are left to speak for themselves.
Mary Meets Mohammad is already creating ripples well beyond its Tasmanian origins.
The film had a sell-out opening week in Hobart earlier this year, and ran for six weeks in the State Cinema, with overwhelmingly positive reviews.
The documentary has been showing at the Schonell Theatre, University of Queensland, and extra screening was scheduled for Saturday, August 10, 3.45pm.
