Stateless (2020)


Cate Blanchett as: Pat Masters
 
Directors: Emma Freeman (Episodes 1-3) and Jocelyn Moorhouse (Episodes 4-6)
Selected Cast: Yvonne Strahovski, Jai Courtney, Fayssal Bazzi, Asher Keddie, Dominic West, Marta Dusseldorp, Rachel House
Based on an Idea by: Cate Blanchett
Created by: Cate Blanchett, Elise McCredie, and Tony Ayres
Written by: Elise McCredie and Belinda Chayko
Release Year: 2020
Genre: Drama
MPAA Rating: TV-MA (US), MA15+ (Australia)

IMDb | Photos | Videos | Official Site | Instagram | Watch on Netflix

A powerful and timely series about four strangers whose lives collide at an immigration detention centre in the middle of the Australian desert. It centres on an airline hostess on the run from a dangerous cult, an Afghan refugee and his family fleeing persecution, a young father escaping a dead-end job and a bureaucrat running out of time to contain a national scandal. Each character deals with the contradictions of protection and border control from a unique perspective, offering topical insight into issues that countries are grappling with around the world.

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Promotional; Behind the scenes
Related Videos

The videos after the trailer are playlists of selected interviews with the cast and creators, just click on the playlist icon/thumbnails to see the other videos in it.


— You can also listen to Post Play podcast where the creators discuss the series.

Quotes from Cate Blanchett

  • “It is my hope that Stateless, a project that actually has grown up separately from my work with UNHCR but brings together two worlds for me, will build empathy and understanding for refugees, particularly those who have been and still are in detention. We live in a world where about one per cent of all humanity is now displaced as a result of conflict or persecution. Through Stateless, I hope to prompt people to rethink how they and we all are responding to the current displacement crisis. To understand what it means to lose your home, your country, your identity. To get people to empathize and to ask questions.” (UNHCR, July 2020)
  • “Whilst this story centres on Australia, the dilemmas that it explores through four absorbing characters will resonate globally: the desire for personal freedom, the need for social stability, an escalating lack of faith in the political process and the deeply unsettling impact this has on individual lives.” (Screen Australia, May 2019)
  • “[The power of Stateless is that it asks more questions than it answers] and in the end that’s our role as storytellers, to reignite the conversation in a non-judgmental way. The way you choose to tell the story simply from a father’s, family’s, perspective, the trauma of the guard, who’s a good-hearted Australian father-of-two, and the bureaucrats who get the complexity of the political situation. It’s not an easy situation, right?” (Sydney Morning Herald, February 2020)
  • On the starting point of the series: “The conversation began not with any particular story, but with the immigration detention stories and the transformation of public conversation around that. That was the backdrop and the atmosphere in which we began wanting to work together. It’s not based on any one person’s experience; there’s been a painstaking amount of research, including scores of people that she [writer Elise McCredie] spoke to and my experience with the UNHCR.” (Deadline, February 2020)
  • On the personal resonance of the story with her: “We started talking in 2013 and I started working for UNHCR in 2014. I started working with them on the issue of statelessness. The title of the series refers to statelessness in a more poetic sense, not in a legal, physical sense. It’s more about identity and the loss of people’s identity when they are faced with long-term detention, when they become a number, when they are dislocated from markers in their life like home and culture, and separated from their families. That’s something I very viscerally felt speaking to stateless people and refugees in the field.
    And so, in the series, we extrapolate out that sense of statelessness to a poetic reality. Anyone who comes into contact with an immigration system at the moment, whether it’s in Australia or Europe, or the rhetoric around building a wall in America, it is slightly maddening. The series started to crystalize for us because of the obvious traumas of people in long-term detentions and people fleeing from trauma when there are no safe, legal pathways to do so.
    What was perhaps more hidden for us was the experience of the bureaucrats and the guards who also come in contact with that system, who experience PTSD and dislocation from their sense of humanity. It’s when we start to fold those experiences into the story that it really came to life.
    In a literal sense, a stateless person is someone who doesn’t have a nationality in any country in the world. They don’t have a legal identity, which has obvious consequences on their ability to enjoy basic human rights. What we’re talking about is people who are poetically dislocated from their identity and therefore, their humanity.”
  • On choosing not to play, Sofie, one of the central characters: “That’s never been my process and probably an easy route for this would have been for me to play the Sofie character, but it didn’t seem right – particularly when Yvonne came into the mix. She was just absolutely right for the role. I wasn’t hiding, weeping in the toilet saying, ‘Why?’ But, equally, I was very happy to put my money where my mouth was and be in it if it helped shepherd it in. So playing Pat, who’s the surrogate mother in this in the same way that Dominic’s character is the surrogate father for Sofie, was great. It was really pleasurable. When my husband and I were running the Sydney Theatre Company, it was a great joy for me to produce the work of others because the world knows how much talent there is in Australia.” (Drama Quarterly, February 2020)
  • On her character, Pat Masters: “Elise kept saying to me, ‘Pat is Australia,’?” says Blanchett, laughing. “Very few of us step away from the window. How did she get there, and at what point do we decide to bear witness to things that we know [are] happening but we feel we don’t have any responsibility to do anything about? … There’s no country that’s not like this, but there are dark sides to sunny Australia. It’s whether we play to that, or speak to our better natures.” (The Saturday Paper, February 2020)
  • Acknowledging the criticism in casting where three of the four main characters are white on a series about refugees where: “[Ameer’s daughter, Mina (Soraya Heidari) is] the beating heart of the story. We’re in no way saying this is the only way to tell this story. I look forward to many more refugee stories being told on television, film or documentary. It is very much about trying to capture a wide audience, because often the reality is that you start talking about refugees and asylum seekers and the global displacement crisis … and (people) turn off because it’s too huge. So we wanted to create a sense of, ‘It could be me, it could be you,’ and so often, that is the white experience. But then you get inside the series, and there’s a multi-various array of characters.” (USA Today, July 2020)

Quotes from Others

  • Tony Ayres:
    — On the choice to have the story as a TV series: “We did discuss the possibility of different forms in those early days and it struck us then that the purpose of this show is to try and start a conversation. And I think television works very well because it is in people’s homes, it gives people the opportunity to participate in that conversation. We’re experiencing a world that is very foreign to most people in Australia and most places in the world. These are people you don’t know. What we were trying to do was bring these people to life in a fully-fleshed way. TV goes into people’s living rooms and we share our lives with these strangers and the longer we spend, the less strange they become.”
  • Dominic West:
    — “It’s been really fun doing it [the series], especially with Cate, because we wear the most appalling clothes. But actually the scenes that I do are deeply distressing.”
    — On what he hopes audience will take from the series: “The importance of this, I suppose, is ultimately to remind us of our common humanity. These aren’t people who should just be chucked in the bin. I’m about to do something on [US military prison] Guantanamo Bay, which is another instance of a government finding a convenient dustbin for people who are difficult, and I think that is very much what this is about. You can’t do that to people.”
  • Fayssal Bazzi:
    — “[The screenplay gave] a voice and representation for a group of people that hasn’t been there before. We’re talking about human beings here that sometimes are reduced to buzzwords and political fodder. So in that sense, I thought it was something I had to be a part of.”
  • Yvonne Strahovski:
    — “But that [Stateless] production has such a special place in my heart — probably more so than any other, just because we talk about real issues and things that are so relatable to things that are going on, immigration issues in real life. And the people that we worked with, the background artists, I’m not sure if Cate mentioned, but they were all people that were hired by the production who were not real actors. They were people who had been through detention before, or had a family member who had been through it. And some of our background artists had been up the road at a detention center that is since now shut down.
    But it was amazing to have this. They really were so connected to the material. So all those group scenes, were so real for them and they kept saying because their responses were so emotional and true and because it was real for these people. It really allowed us, as actors, to connect even more to the humanity of this experience and portraying these stories.”

Trivia & Facts

  • Filmed in South Australia.
  • The story is based on Cornelia Rau, an Australian woman who joined the cult KENJA and was detained for 10 months in a woman’s prison and then at Baxter Detention Center, one of Australia’s immigration detention camps.
  • Cate Blanchett was initially set to direct the series. According to Deadline, the series was conceived in her kitchen in 2013.
  • Cate Blanchett is a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) since 2016 so the story has a personal resonance to her.
  •  The series premiered on 26 February 2020 at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival.
  • Produced by Matchbox Pictures and Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton’s Dirty Films for ABC (Australia) with funding from Screen Australia.
  • Cate Blanchett’s first major TV project since Heartland (1994).
  • Fayssal Bazzi had to learn speak Dari, a form of Persian spoken in Afghanistan, for her character, Ameer.
  • The series premiered on ABC in Australia on 1 March 2020, then on Netflix worldwide on 8 July 2020.
  • The series was nominated for 18 AACTA awards in the TV section, it won 13 including for Best Miniseries or Telefeature, Best TV Screenplay (episode 1) for Elise McCredie, Best Lead Actor in TV for Fayssal Bazzi, Best Lead Actress for Yvonne Strahovski, Best Guest or Supporting Actress in a TV for Cate Blanchett, Best Direction in TV for Emma Freeman, more accolades here.
  • Cate Blanchett won two AACTA awards for the series: supporting actress and producer.
  • Cate Blanchett and Elise McCredie have been friends since high school, they have also worked together in theatre while they were studying at University of Melbourne.

Berlinale photocall and premiere