Framing lived experience with ‘Damage’ director Madeleine Blackwell
Damage is a movie about Ali, an asylum seeker, driving a taxi using another man’s licence. He relies on GPS to navigate a city he doesn’t know. His passenger, Esther, is an elderly woman who can’t remember where she is going. She’s angry because she’s been stripped of everything that is familiar to her, and she doesn’t recognise the world anymore. They travel through the night in search of a vague destination while surveillance cameras mark their journey, coldly redacting the human element, defining who belongs and who does not, who is safe and who is not. What they are left with is their damage – she can’t remember and he cannot forget. Director Madeleine Blackwell joined Jono on Tuesday Drive to deep-dive into her personal approaches in creating the film, and its commentary on living in a constructed world.
Damage screens nationally around Australia on Thursday, 9 November.
