This site uses film clips from Chasing Asylum to explore the following themes and messages: expression, triumph, compassion, justice, injustice, fear, hope, power and politics.

UNHCR’s latest Global Trends report highlights that at the end of 2015, global displacement reached a record high of 65.3 million people who have been forced to leave their homes, an increase of 4.8 million people since last year. Each year, UNHCR releases statistics on the number of forcibly displaced people worldwide, including refugees, internally displaced people, people seeking asylum and stateless people.

This quick guide provides statistics on the number of asylum seekers that have arrived by boat in Australia since 1976 when the first wave of boats carrying people seeking asylum from the aftermath of the Vietnam War began to arrive.

Operation Sovereign Borders is a military-led response to ‘combat people smuggling and protect [Australia’s] borders’, a policy the Coalition took to the September 2013 federal election. Its aim is to stop asylum seekers from reaching Australia by boat, and to deny such asylum seekers resettlement in Australia.

Exclusive: In his 43-year career, Paul Stevenson has worked in the aftermath of the Bali bombings and the Boxing Day tsunami but says nothing he witnessed was as bad as the treatment of asylum seekers on Nauru and Manus.

A Salvation Army worker identified as allegedly leading a fatal attack on Iranian asylum seeker Reza Berati on Manus Island in February is expected to be charged in Papua New Guinea.

Australia has a long history of offering protection to refugees. In the post-World War II period it has predominantly been in an offshore refugee settlements program where by it has assisted international efforts to resettle almost 600,000 refugees. In recent years, however, substantial numbers of asylum seeker have arrived on Australia's shores and this has seen the development of an onshore program which involved the detention on asylum seekers. This paper summarises the development of refugee policy in Australia.

This site provides a list of conventions applied to Documentary film making – it must be remembered that not all conventions apply to all film texts.

Can we establish standards for an ethical documentary practice? This is not a purely rhetorical question, as the debate around whether Mighty Times: Volume 2: The Children's March (2004; Robert Hudson, Bobby Houston, dirs./prods.) deserved receiving an Oscar in 2005 indicates. The film apparently merged reenactments and historical footage indistinguishably, and used archival shots of violence in one time and place to represent violence in another.

Interpretation of 'documentary' for the Australian Content Standard.

The article focuses on the use of technological and interactive developments in documentary filmmaking. It states that the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) has engaged technological innovations in filmmaking, mentioning that NFB had won several awards for its production using the approach. It explores the significance of using specific elements in enhancing the online delivery of a film.

Presents an abbreviated version of a paper presented as a dialogue at the Australian Teachers Of Media National Conference held July 2 to 4, 2005 in Melbourne, Victoria. Exploration of the motif of the anti-hero in the context of cultural insularity and heterogeneity reinforced by the vulnerability of the Australian film industry within a global cinema market; National identity in Australian documentaries.

This article explores the way in which asylum seekers and refugees have been discursively constructed by the print media in both the UK and Australia between 2001 and 2010. 40 articles were selected for analysis following a discursive psychological approach (Potter and Wetherell, 1987). It was found that the print media, in both the UK and Australia, draw on a number of interpretative repertoires when constructing accounts of refugees and asylum seekers. The principal repertoire found to be used was that of the "unwanted invader‟, which was achieved through the use of metaphors of criminals and water.

The welfare and future of asylum seekers in Australia have been very contentious contemporary issues. Findings based on content analysis of media releases in 2001 and 2002 reveal the unrelentingly negative way in which the federal government portrayed asylum seekers.

Popular rhetoric about immigration often operates by constructing metaphoric representations of immigrants that concretize the social "problem" and connote particular situations. Scholars have identified discursive connections between the rhetoric of immigrations and representations of other human problems such as crime or war.