Molly and Mobarak

Clip 3: Mobarak becomes Australian

Taken from the documentary Molly and Mobarak (2003)

Original title classification M – this clip chosen to be G

Curator’s clip description

Local TAFE teacher, Ann Bell, comments that assisting the refugees from Afghanistan is more than teaching English. She meets with the mayor of Young, John Walker, to seek his help in getting permanent status visas for the Hazaras. She wants to argue the case that the refugees have been important in the regional and economic development of Young.

Lyn Rule chats with Mobarak in her kitchen about how he has changed since his arrival in Australia and whether he has become more Australian.

Curator’s notes

Filmmaker Tom Zubrycki has captured the poignant moments in the lives of the people involved. It is a consummate skill learned after many documentaries to be able to sense when to be there and when to shoot.

Lauren Williams, curator

Teachers’ notes

provided by The Le@rning Federation

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This clip briefly shows TAFE teacher Ann Bell with a group of male Afghan students, talking to an interviewer about their needs beyond those of language and literacy. She then meets John Walker, the Mayor of Young (a rural town in New South Wales). She explains to him the strategy for attaining permanent refugee status for a group of Hazara refugees from Afghanistan. This discussion with the Mayor is intercut with street shots of Young. One of the refugees, Mobarak Tahiri, the subject of the documentary, then talks to Lyn Rule, a woman who has befriended him, about how he has changed.

Educational value points

The clip highlights the plight of asylum seekers. The Australian Refugee and Humanitarian Program officially offers protection to asylum seekers. However, community groups such as Amnesty Australia, Rural Australians for Refugees and a number of refugee action groups see the human cost of Australia’s policy of intercepting, detaining and returning failed asylum seekers as being too high.

The Hazara is a little-known but much-persecuted group of refugees and the clip provides a glimpse into their story. The Hazara are a minority group in Afghanistan, and many fled the Taliban regime. Between 1999 and 2002, 3,457 Hazaras entered Australia and many have applied to remain to escape ethnic conflict in Afghanistan.

The issue of identity is a major one confronting refugees. Mobarak’s need to fit into Australian society, to become an ‘Aussie boy’, inevitably conflicts with the need to hold onto a sense of identity and of belonging to the groups and customs of his country of origin. To relinquish these entirely is to invite disorientation and a negation of personal history. Much is to be gained, but also to be lost in assimilation into a host culture.

Molly and Mobarak exemplifies the genre of ‘observational documentary’. This subgenre of documentary filmmaking is purported to be closer to reality, as it is unscripted, with action being dictated by the subjects rather than by any predetermined plot or staging of scenes. It is therefore more experimental and exploratory, as well as being more risky for the filmmaker, who must rely on choosing the right moments to film. This is a skill for which director Tom Zubrycki is acclaimed. Zubrycki, like other observational documentary makers, also eschews the use of reconstructions, working only with the real action taking place in front of the camera.

Observational filmmakers often form close relationships with their subjects in the hope of filming scenes that would not otherwise be played out in front of an audience. Zubrycki stayed at the Rules’ house, giving him highly personal access to his subjects and allowing them to become used to the camera’s presence. This clip invites examination of the methods of observational documentary filmmaking.

The footage offers a snapshot of an Australian country town and its inhabitants. Beneath the genial interactions of the women and the Mayor, there is a hint of the economic desperation experienced by many rural centres. When young people move to the city, country towns lose labour, and the speakers indicate that the economic argument will benefit their cause. However, it is not the economic imperative that drives Ann Bell and Lyn Rule. These country-town residents are shown to be kind hearted and sympathetic to the plight of the Hazara. Bell and Rule seek to help, giving voluntarily of their own time, opening their homes to strangers and fighting on their behalf, while also offering emotional support.

Molly and Mobarak (2003) is a highly regarded Australian documentary. It had its international premiere in Toronto and opened the Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival in New York in the year of its release. It was also shown at the prestigious Joris Ivens competition for feature documentaries at IDFA (International Documentary Festival Amsterdam), the largest documentary festival in the world. Molly and Mobarak has received a considerable amount of media coverage and achieved fame for its creator, mainly because of its sensitivity to highly topical issues concerning refugees.

The clip showcases the work of documentary filmmaker Tom Zubrycki. A respected and experienced filmmaker and producer, Zubrycki studied sociology at the University of New South Wales in the early 1970s. This informed his aim of using his skills to enlighten and provoke audiences, expose injustice and contribute to a common humanity. His films tend to follow social and political events as they unfold, as in this example. Zubrycki has a personal interest in the effects of displacement, as his own father escaped from Poland in 1939.