Documentaries
Almost Sunrise, which launches on TVNZ OnDemand on Friday, is as much a campaign as it is cinema. The documentary follows Iraq war veterans Tom Voss and Anthony Anderson as they trek 4300km across the US in a bid to resolve the “moral injury” of their role in the war. Its creators are seeking to draw attention to the emotional damage done to young men ordered into actions that haunt and prey on them years later.
Annie Goldson’s He Toki Huna, which asked some searching questions about New Zealand’s role in the long conflict in Afghanistan,
got plenty of headlines in
2013 – but it wasn’t the first time Goldson had looked at the plight of Afghanistan’s innocents. On Sunday, Māori Television screens Goldson’s 2005 documentary Pacific Solution: From Afghanistan to Aotearoa (7.30pm) and makes it available on demand.
It tells the story of several Afghan boys among 131 taken as refugees by New Zealand after Australian PM John
Howard refused permission for the Norwegian freighter Tampa, which had rescued them from drowning in 2001, to enter Australian waters.
Much has happened since. The Tampa rescue was a month before the September 11 attacks, and the boys were fleeing the then-ascendant Taliban, but the film offers context on the refugee crises that have developed since. The other thing it offers? Hope.