STATELESS
CATE BLANCHETT TAKES US INSIDE IMMIGRATION DRAMA STATELESS… CATE BLANCHETT
Cate Blanchett turns TV producer for a six-years-inthe-making passion project.
Six years in the making, Stateless has been a long time coming. “It was a passion project, as they say,” says Cate Blanchett, sitting down with Small Screen shortly before the Australian show receives its premiere at the Berlin Film Festival. Producing television is new territory for the two-time Oscar winner, who is joined in Berlin by one of her co-creators, Elise McCredie, and co-star Dominic West.
“When Andrew [Upton, Blanchett’s husband] and I were running the Sydney Theatre Company, we really enjoyed producing other people’s work,” notes Blanchett, “and it can sometimes be ‘hard yakka’, as they say in Australia, to forge a career in the arts. It can be a bit brutal. So, if you have a chance to scaffold and support people’s career development… I found that really rewarding. It’s not necessarily about finding a story I can be front and centre of.”
Blanchett features in Stateless as Pat, the co-leader of a cult alongside West’s charismatic Gordon, but theirs is just one strand in this multi-layered look at Australia’s immigration detention system. When Blanchett first joined forces with co-creators McCredie and Tony Ayres in 2014, the topic was hot news. “We just couldn’t shake it off,” she says. “We were just so gripped by what we were reading.”
IN LIMBO
Back then, Australia was shipping its asylum-seeking detainees to offshore islands, following a government initiative called the Pacific Solution. “We wanted to reverse-engineer it,
and to go back to the last moment of on-shore detention,” says Blanchett. With the show – directed by Emma Freeman and Proof’s Jocelyn Moorhouse – set in the early 2000s, it takes place just at the time that Australia faced refugees from Indonesia and ‘stop the boats’ became a mantra in some quarters.
“The government of the time basically set up many camps, over a number of years, that were very isolated, often in the desert, often in searing heat,” explains McCredie, who co-wrote the six episodes with Belinda Chayko. “Basically prison camps, where these people were interred until their refugee status was accepted or not. But that process took years and years and years, so there were many years of indefinite detention for these people.”
Effectively, Blanchett has been researching the subject for years through her work with the UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR. “The stateless people I’ve met have all said that they feel invisible and they talk about this terrible limbo that they’re in,” she says. “They have no access to basic human rights, so it’s a generational problem. And
it can happen as simply as losing your passport or losing your identity papers… so your children can’t get an education, you can’t access basic medical care, you can’t get married.”
Blanchett calls Stateless the “elephant in the room” series, with its difficult subject matter turning off a number of financiers over time. Eventually greenlit by Australia’s ABC – with Blanchett’s own Dirty Films on board – the show was shot in South Australia, around Adelaide. With global rights snapped up by Netflix, it boasts an international cast led by The Handmaid’s Tale star Yvonne Strahovski as Sofie, an air hostess who winds up at the Barton detention centre.
Sofie’s story was part-inspired by Cornelia Rau, a German-Australian woman and former Qantas flight attendant who was held as a suspected illegal immigrant after escaping from a controversial Sydney-based cult, Kenja. West, in particular, explored the world of real-life sects. “It was very reminiscent of drama school to me,” he laughs. While his character preys on “people’s need for belonging, people’s need for a sense of family”, this also feeds into the show’s titular theme. “To then be kicked out of that [environment] is to become stateless in another way.”
BEYOND BORDERS
Also featuring in the story are Suicide Squad’s Jai Courtney as newly inducted guard Cam Sandford, Asher Keddie as the centre’s ambitious bureaucrat Clare Kowitz, and Fayssal Bazzi as Ameer, an Afghan man seeking passage to
Australia. “By doing these multiple perspectives, we are saying as creators that we can have empathy with all of these sides,” claims McCredie. “And if you can empathise with those beyond your own experience, then surely you can no longer put up a wall or have an ‘us and them’.”
One of the things Stateless shows is how universal the issue is. “Every country has done it differently,” McCredie adds. “Germany has opened the gates and a million refugees [arrived]. Australia has done the opposite. America is doing a zero tolerance… every country is approaching it differently, and there is no one to say that’s right or wrong.”
If anything, the show reminds us of our common humanity, concludes West. “These aren’t people [to be] chucked in the bin. You can’t do that. We’re all ultimately humans, and what are we going to do about it?” James Mottram
STATELESS WILL BE ON NETFLIX IN JUNE TBC.