Discoveries from Nauru World Cinema

Recording a 24-hour period throughout every country in the world, we explore a greater diversity of perspectives than ever seen before on screen. We follow characters and events that evolve throughout the day, interspersed with expansive global montages that explore the progression of life from birth, to death, to birth again. In the end, despite unprecedented challenges and tragedies throughout the world, we are reminded that every day we are alive there is hope and a choice to see a better future together. Founded in 2008, it set out to explore our planet's identity and challenges in an attempt to answer the question: Who are we?

Washed ashore on a small island in the Pacific, shipwrecked Scottish sailor, Hamish MacKay, is quickly taken captive by local islander Adiben. On route back to Adiben’s village where an ill fate certainly awaits him, Hamish must figure out a way to escape his captor. At the same time, Adiben must make an impossible choice: to fulfil his responsibility to his people or to help a stranger lost at the far end of the sea.

The island of Nauru is home to more than a hundred child refugees, stuck in asylum limbo. Harsh Australian border controls have led to the incarceration of adults and children alike on remote islands. Detained for years on end, surrounded by fences living in tents, many of these children see little hope of fulfilling even their most basic dreams of living a normal life with freedom and dignity.

In Nauruan, Anubumin means "night"—and darkness is what the fourth joint film by Zanny Begg and Oliver Ressler begins with. The small and inconspicuous island of Nauru with close to 10,000 inhabitants lies in the Pacific at a great distance to the mainland. But Nauru is a tragic place steeped in history that has been overwritten by numerous narratives. The film addresses these different narratives, starting with the early exploitation of the island and its calcite and phosphate deposits by the colonial powers in the 19th century. After the golden 1970s, when the "Birdshit island" was flush with money, the phosphate was completely mined and the island state soon became insolvent. Since then, Nauru has turned into a gloomy place: 80% of the area is uninhabitable; the attempt to tap new sources of income led to the wide-scale practice of money laundering.

A man returns to his village from abroad, only to hear about the ghosts that haunt the place.

This film looks at Nauru in 1962 when it had the highest per-capita income in the world but when the depletion of the country's phosphate resources was already on the horizon meaning the only industry they had, and the only source of foreign investment, was coming to an end. Having become accustomed to the ways of the modern, industrialized world but with no way of supporting themselves how will the Nauruans maintain their lifestyle?