- Trailer
Island of the Hungry Ghosts Details
- Year of Production: 2017
- Length: 94 minutes
- Color: Color
- Screening Format: Digital
- Language: Cantonese, English, Farsi, French, Hokkien, and Mandarin with English subtitles
- Screens with: SHELTER: Human Stories from Central America
About the Film
Filmmaker Gabrielle Brady will attend via Skype for discussion!
Poh Lin is a trauma counsellor living on the remote Christmas Island with her young family. Poh Lin’s job is to work with people trying to seek asylum to Australia who have been detained in a high security detention facility, deep within the islands jungle.
The island is one of the last discovered places on earth, with humans having migrated to its shores less than a century ago. The original inhabitants are the forty million land crabs. Pulled by the force of the full moon they begin their epic odyssey from the island’s jungle to its rugged coastline.
As Poh Lin and her family explore the island’s powerful and threatening landscape, a disquieting sensation grows. Local islanders carry out their ‘hungry ghost’ rituals for the spirits of those who died on the island without a proper burial. They make offerings to appease the lost souls, who are said to be wandering the jungles at night without a home.
In the intimacy of her therapy sessions, Poh Lin feels the oncoming dystopia, as the mental state of her clients begin to unravel.
“Gorgeous… [A] beautifully rendered portrait of an alien landscape… Reality is suspended and in its place Brady’s surrealist dreamscape, shot breathtakingly by Michael Latham, becomes an all-encompassing tribunal on man’s inhumanity to man in a clandestine landscape filled with lost spirits.” – Filmmaker Magazine
Best Documentary Feature at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival. Winner of a Special Jury Mention for Best Documentary at the 2018 Edinburgh International Film Festival. Winner of the Buyon-Chagoll Prize at the 2018 Visions du Reel.
About the Filmmakers
Gabrielle Brady Director
Gabrielle Brady (Director, Writer and Producer) is an Australian filmmaker who makes documentary and hybrid films. Gabrielle studied direction at the Cuban International Film School (EICTV), were she lived and made films for three years. Gabrielle has lived nomadically for the past ten years, traveling between Cuba, Mongolia, Indonesia, the Australian central desert and Europe. […] Read More
Screens with: SHELTER: Human Stories from Central America
SHELTER: Human Stories from Central America Details
- Year of Production: 2018
- Length: 14 minutes
- Color: Color
- Screening Format: Digital
- Language: English
About the Film
A quiet look at the lives on the line. First-hand stories from Central American migrants and asylum seekers searching for a better life in the north.
About the Filmmakers
Kaz Firpo Director
KAZ FIRPO is an award-winning director, screenwriter, and photographer, and a graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. His work explores humanism and systems of power. Born and raised in the forests of Northern California, his impact storytelling has landed him on the Forbes 30 Under 30, at the top of the 2017 Black […] Read More