A vivid ode to Country and an intimate portrait of an Aboriginal elder’s final year as he strives to preserve his culture and heal his homelands, scarred by the largest contaminated site in the Southern Hemisphere.
The late Banjima Elder, Maitland Parker, called his Yurlu (land) "Poison Country" - a haunting truth he carried in his body, as he too fell to its toxic legacy.
Banjima Country lies within the remote red gorges of Western Australia’s Pilbara, scarred by the Wittenoom asbestos mines which dumped millions of tons of lethal asbestos tailings.
The exclusion zone around the waste dumped from the mines is eight times the size of Manhattan. It is Australia’s very own Chernobyl – a sacrifice zone that cuts off traditional owners from their homelands.
Diagnosed with mesothelioma, Maitland health declines rapidly. But as his family of great-grandchildren grows, so does his determination to complete his unfinished work.
For the first time, this toxic disaster is centred from the perspective of Banjima.
Maitland and his family's fight will inspire and catalyze. This will be Maitland's legacy and YURLU | COUNTRY will immortalize it.
Yaara Bou Melhem is an award-winning filmmaker based in Sydney, Australia whose work has received two UN Media Peace Awards, two New York Film & Television Festival Awards and five Walkley Awards.
Yaara’s wrote, directed and produced feature-length documentary, UNSEEN SKIES (2021) which interrogates the inner workings of mass surveillance, computer vision and artificial intelligence. Production partners include Participant (USA). It was nominated for Best Documentary at the San Francisco International Film Festival and Sydney Film Festival and is now represented by Magnolia International after a successful film festival run.
Yaara has also directed and produced documentary shorts including WAR ON TRUTH (2019) about Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Maria Ressa and the Filipino editor’s global campaign against disinformation. She recently wrote, directed and co-produced THE WHITELEY ART SCANDAL (2023), a 2 x 1hr series about one of Australia’s biggest art crime fraud trials for the ABC.
Yaara turned to filmmaking after 15-years as a long-form broadcast journalist working for some of the most acclaimed international current affairs programs including SBS Dateline, ABC Foreign Correspondent and 101 East, Al Jazeera English. She holds degrees in Journalism and Law.
