Stateless made its way to Netflix on 8th July 2020. The Australian television drama series is based on the real-life incident of Cornelia Rau, an Australian permanent resident who was unlawfully detained under the Australian Government’s mandatory detention program.
Directed by Emma Freeman and Jocelyn Moorhouse, the series stars Yvonne Strahovski, Asher Keddie, Fayssal Bazzi, Marta Dusseldorp alongside other cast members.
The Pain With Which They Come
The pain, struggle, and fear of immigrants is not a new topic. The series is six episodes long – It’s well written and acted, throughout the six episodes you won’t want to leave. It takes you through the aftermath of sexual assault and how a person can lose themselves forever in the process of trying to find themselves.
The premise revolves around three people and their families and it manages to keep them intertwined – Sofie Werner (Yvonne Strahovski); Cam Sandford (Jai Courtney) and Ameer (Fayssal Bazzi) – a flight attendant, a junkyard worker, and a farmer resp.
Sofie joins a shady self-help group GOPA and in the turn of events, the head Gordon sexually assaults her. With a family who doesn’t support her and a help group that ultimately broke her, Sofie ends in a detention centre by mistake. While Ameer has escaped with his family from Afghanistan due to the Taliban torture and Cam is a soft-hearted person but as soon as he starts working in the detention centre the cruelty of the world becomes clearer.
While a lot of series offer drama which undermines the whole concept of the show, Stateless does not do that. It is straight to the point and will make you feel a lot of things.
The Refugees vs The System
The system has its way of tormenting people who are not the same or “right” according to them. They torture them, isolate them, and break them mentally.
The character of Ameer is the representative of every man who is willing to fight to the death for his family. He leaves a lot of things to think about. Millions of people like him have a family but can never live with them.
While the character of Sofie saw justice towards the end, Ameer’s family doesn’t and probably he’ll live there forever because he is named as ‘people smuggler’ when he isn’t one. Does this mean that yet again the white citizen got justice faster than a person of colour? The outrage over a white woman mistakenly falling into the immigration system inspired more concern among the public than a repeated proof of abuses against people of colour is troubling.
Stream It or Skip It?
STREAM IT! Stateless is well written and directed.
During the course of watching the series, you won’t find any flaw in the storyline. The thought about the cast being mostly white will grab your attention some timer later.
Honestly, the problem isn’t about having a white cast, it’s just about how people of colour are made to suffer, people like Ameer.
Stateless is now streaming on Netflix.