The film continues an enduring friendship between Muzafar and documentary filmmaker Jolyon Hoff which began in 2013 when Jolyon, then living in Jakarta and in response to Australia’s ‘stop the boats’ rhetoric, realised he’d never met a refugee. He looked on the internet and found out where they lived, rented a car, and drove up the hill to a place called Cisarua where he was introduced to Muzafar.
Muzafar Ali is a Hazara artist from Afghanistan who grew up in Pakistan as a refugee. In 2004, when he was 17, he returned to Afghanistan to work with the United Nations disarmament program. This work took him across the country, and he extensively photographed the regions, providing an insight into rarely documented areas.
In 2015 Muzafar was resettled to Australia through the humanitarian visa program (living for a time with Jolyon and his family). He and Jolyon then made the documentary film The Staging Post, about the process of establishing a refugee-led school in Indonesia, which toured cinemas, community centres and church halls around Australia for two years, becoming one of Australia most successful documentaries ever. All the while they have raised money to support refugee-led initiatives in southeast Asia, including supporting six schools in Indonesia and Bangkok. They also support refugee resettlement through the Canadian refugee sponsorship program and other complimentary resettlement programs.
In 2023, they are attempting to resettle refugees from Indonesia through Australia’s skilled migration visa program; matching the refugees who, because of the refugee-led schools are now well educated and native English speakers, with rural and regional businesses who are desperate for capable workers. They continue to advocate for more generous refugee settlement programs in Australia and they promote refugee-led initiatives within the global refugee support structure.
Their new film Watandar: My Countryman, which had its world premiere at the 2022 Adelaide Film Festival, came about when Muzafar was asked to photograph the Afghan Cameleer descendants at their 160 year anniversary celebrations in Marree, in remote South Australia. His photography project became a personal journey as he recognised, in the descendants, his own search for a new Afghan-Australian identity.
View the trailer here: https://www.watandar.com.au/
