“A Jewish wise man once said that blessings should not only be spoken at good and happy occasions such as meals and weddings, but also – God forbid! – at disastrous and sad occurrences.” – Pinhaus Braun, refugee from Germany, quoted in The Dunera’s Internees

Two ships on their way to Australia. It is high summer and they are gradually approaching the equator. Both have human cargo on board: the British troop transport ship HMT Dunera is overfilled with upwards of 2500 German and Austrian Jews. Men between the ages of 16 and 60, internees who had found temporary exile in England. The container ship Tampa, sailing under the Norwegian flag, has taken 483 men, women and children on board – asylum seekers from Afghanistan. Both ships are hopelessly overloaded, basic necessities are lacking. Far from their homelands, both refugee groups have been branded as traitors, “fifth columns” or terrorists. Both have suffered persecution and exile, and both look forward to an extremely uncertain future. Their stories lead us to the Australian desert, a sort of no-man’s-land.

A comparison of these two odysseys – that of the HMT Dunera in 1940 and of the MS Tampa in 2001, separated by a period of almost exactly 60 years – reveals astonishing parallels. The first journey, a retrospectively tragicomic trip undertaken by a number of Central Europeans, is a now-forgotten episode of the Second World War. The second is part of the exodus of as many as 6 million Afghan refugees – an exodus that began in the early 80s and continues to this day, over three decades later.

Director: John Burgan
Writers: John Burgan, Gunter Hanfgarn
Cinematographer: Rainer M. Schulz
Editors: John Burgan, Gunter Hanfgarn
Commissioning editor: Burkhard Althoff
Production managers: Andrea Ufer, Sabine Engel
Producer: Gunter Hanfgarn
Co-producers: ZDF Das kleine Fernsehspiel
Channel: ZDF
Sponsors: Filmstiftung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Filmförderung Hamburg

– Best Documentary, New Berlin Film Award, 2006
– Duisburg Film Week, 2005