JOHN PILGER’S EPIC NEW FILM ‘UTOPIA’ SET FOR ITUNES, CURZON ON DEMAND AND UK DVD DEBUT
“John Pilger unearths, with steely attention to facts, the filthy truth and tells it as it is” – Harold Pinter.
“Pilger’s work has truly been a beacon of light in dark times” – Noam Chomsky.
A shocking new film about one of the world’s greatest current social and economic injustices is set for its iTunes, Curzon on Demand and UK home entertainment debut. From Emmy and BAFTA winning journalist John Pilger, UTOPIA is new film about Australian apartheid which will be available to view on iTunes and Curzon on Demand on 15 November, and to own on DVD on 2 December 2013, (RRP £14.99) ahead of its ITV1 transmission later that month.
Utopia is a vast region in northern Australia and home to the oldest human presence on earth. “This film is a journey into that secret country”, says Pilger in UTOPIA. It describes not only the uniqueness of the first Australians, but also their trail of tears, betrayal and resistance – from one utopia to another. Pilger begins his journey in Sydney, where he grew up, and in Canberra, the nation’s capital, where the national parliament rises in an affluent suburb called Barton, recently awarded the title of Australia’s most advantaged community.
Barton was named after Edmund Barton, the first prime minister of Australia, who in 1901 introduced the White Australia Policy. ‘The doctrine of the equality of man,’ said Barton, ‘was never intended to apply to those who weren’t British and white-skinned.’ He made no mention of the original inhabitants who were deemed barely human, unworthy of recognition in the world’s first suburban utopia.
One of the world's best-kept secrets is revealed against a background of the greatest boom in mineral wealth. Has the 'lucky country' inherited South African apartheid? And how could this happen in the 21stcentury? What role has the media played? UTOPIA is both a personal journey and universal story of power and resistance on how modern societies can be divided between those who conform and a dystopian world of those who do not conform.
Adding further substance to Pilger’s film are thirty interviews with Aborigine elders, journalist and broadcaster Jeff McMullen, Salil Shetty, Secretary for Amnesty International, Australian politicians and a wide variety of NGOs, experts in Aborigine culture and victims of the current system.
UTOPIA draws on people and places Pilger first filmed 28 years ago during his long association with the indigenous people of his homeland.
Special features exclusive to the UK DVD are:
- Booklet by Pilger expert Anthony Hayward
- More than four hours of unseen footage filmed during the making of UTOPIA.
UTOPIA is produced by Secret Country Films and Dartmouth Films in association with Network Releasing.
For further information visit:
https://www.facebook.com/Johnpilgerutopia
https://twitter.com/Utopia_Film
http://www.facebook.com/DartmouthFilms
Notes to Editor
UTOPIA Running Time: 110 minutes
iTunes and Curzon on Demand: 15 November
DVD Release Date: 2 December
Catalogue Number: 7954042
RRP: £14.99
For more information about the DVD and Itunes releases contact
Luciano Chelotti or Sabina Maharjan
Network Distributing, Units 19-20 Berghem Mews, Blythe Road, London W14 0HN
Email: luciano.chelotti@networkdistributing.com or sabina.maharjan@networkdistributing.com
Tel: 020 7605 4422 or 020 7605 4424
For further information on the cinema release of UTOPIA please contact:
ARPR alex.rowley@ar-pr.co.uk or lauren.papendorf@ar-pr.co.uk
Tel: 07753738777
For details about the ITV1 broadcast of UTOPIA in December 2013 contact
Grant Cunningham or Tom Hudson at the ITV Press Office
grant.cunningham@itv.com or tom.hudson@itv.com
Tel: 0207 1573015
BACKGROUND
The world is facing a desperate hunt for resources. The most powerful economies demand the fossil fuels and minerals that ensure their dominance and survival. Only one western country escaped the economic earthquake of 2008 – the vast, ancient and fabulously rich continent of Australia.
Australia has become the source of the “last gold”: a hidden trove of gold, silver, uranium, iron ore, bauxite, zinc, lead, diamonds, and unlimited reserves of liquid gas. The struggle for this treasure is an epic story rarely told, illuminating the very notions of power and greed, justice and human rights, war and peace. It is the story of Utopia.
Some 200 miles north-east of Alice Springs, in the ‘red heart’ of Australia, lies Utopia. The ghost-white trunks of eucalyptus rise from skeins of fine red sand and strange rock shapes. Some 2000 people live here, the most enduring human presence on earth.
Until the 1970s, these first Australians were invisible; unlike the pastoralists’ sheep, they were not counted. On August 16, 1975, standing in the heat of Utopia, the red sand spilling from his cupped, outstretched hand, Australia’s reforming prime minister Gough Whitlam symbolically handed back a token part of this land to the Gurindji people. “I put into your hands this piece of the earth itself,” said Whitlam, “as a sign that we restore [these lands] to you and your children forever.” This was the consequence of the longest strike in Australia’s history. Nine years earlier, the Gurindgi stockmen and their families had walked off the world’s largest cattle station, run by the British beef baron Lord Vestey. They had been paid with little or no money and in rations. Their action marked the beginning of the end of slave labour in Australia.
Three months later, Whitlam’s government was overturned in unprecedented circumstances, using imperial “reserve powers”. Kerr’s action prevented Whitlam from implementing radical legislation that would have given universal land rights to Aboriginal Australians, a first step in ending their dispossession and impoverishment and in sharing Australia’s wealth.
The following year, limited land rights were granted in the Northern Territory. Intended as a gesture to ‘quieten the lobby’, it inadvertently made the people of Utopia legal custodians over the riches in their midst. Since then, every Australian government, backed and bankrolled by the world’s biggest mining companies, has sought to claw back these rights, often secretly.
In the 1990s, a group of politicians, self-styled historians and journalists – all sharing views of cultural supremacy – erected a ‘respectable’ façade to the claw-back campaign. According to them, there had been no racism in Australia, no genocide, no theft of land.
Prime Minister John Howard spoke in passionate support of the revisionists, whose theme was that the first Australians had no right to the land. They were savages, it was whispered, noble and otherwise. The National Museum of Australia was forced to ‘revise’ its Aboriginal section. Educators were pressured; Australia’s most distinguished historian of black Australia, Professor Henry Reynolds, was pilloried for his ‘black arm-band’ view of history – the historical truth behind the tourist postcard image of Australia.
This truth was that Australia’s past was far from benign. More than 100,000 children were taken from their mothers as part of an official policy to ‘breed out the black’ – then used as a form of slave labour: the girls as servants in middle class families, the boys as labourers on the great cattle stations. This was the Stolen Generation, whose suffering Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised for in 2008. But the ‘stealing’ of children and its assimilationist cruelties have not stopped. The film reveals that indigenous children are being removed from their families at twice the rate as during the 20th century.
Australia is the world’s twelfth largest economy, yet the First Australians have the lowest life expectancy of any of the world’s indigenous peoples. Thousands never reach the age of 40. An entire black rugby league team, champions in the 1980s, no longer exists, the victims of preventable disease and suicide. Young black men are incarcerated at eight times the rate of apartheid South Africa in vast, rich Western Australia, home of to the current “resources boom”.
Unknown to most Australians, remote indigenous communities in the Northern Territory are being socially engineered into urban “hubs” where they must be “economically viable”. This policy was initiated in 2007 when Prime Minister Howard and his minister Mal Brough declared a state of emergency in the Northern Territory and sent the army into indigenous communities “to save the children”. They claimed that paedophiles were operating in “gangs” and in “unthinkable numbers”. This was later shown to be false – but it proved an effective generator of a familiar moral panic with hidden agendas. The Howard government told Aboriginal elders that unless they agreed to hand over the leases to their land they would be denied basic services like the provision of decent housing and sanitation – an echo of apartheid.
Utopia is John Pilger’s fourth film on indigenous Australia. More than two years in the making, it is John Pilger’s journey behind the façade of ‘lucky Australia’. Many of those he filmed he first met during the making of his seminal The Secret Country in 1985.
Utopia will be shown worldwide and in Australia early in 2014.
JOHN PILGER - BIOGRAPHY
John Pilger has been a war correspondent, author and film-maker. An Australian, he is only one of two to win British journalism’s highest award twice. For his documentary films, he has won an Emmy and a British Academy Award. His epic 1979 Cambodia Year Zero is ranked by the British Film Institute as one of the ten most important documentaries of the 20th century. His Death of a Nation, filmed secretly in East Timor, had a worldwide impact in 1994. His books include Heroes, Freedom Next Time and A Secret Country, a history of Australia. His long association with indigenous Australia has produced four ground-breaking films, including his latest, Utopia. He is a recipient of Australia’s international human rights award, the Sydney Peace Prize, “for “enabling the voices of the powerless to be heard” and “for fearless challenges to censorship in any form”. He has made 58 documentary films; his most recent were The War on Democracy and The War You Don’t See.
Luciano Chelotti or Sabina Maharjan
Network Distributing, Units 19-20 Berghem Mews, Blythe Road, London W14 0HN
Email: luciano.chelotti@networkdistributing.com or sabina.maharjan@networkdistributing.com
Tel: 020 7605 4422 or 020 7605 4424
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