A vivid ode to Country and an intimate portrait of a dying Aboriginal elder’s final year as he attempts to preserve his culture and heal his homelands scarred by the largest contaminated site in the Southern Hemisphere.
Aboriginal Elder, Maitland Parker calls his lands ‘Poison Country’. He too has been poisoned.
Banjima Country, lays amidst the vivid and remote red gorges of the Pilbara, Western Australia. One of the oldest crusts on earth, Banjima honour it as a living and breathing entity.
This stunning landscape is also scarred by Australia’s very own Chernobyl-scale ruin - where asbestos waste has rendered an area more than half the size of Berlin inaccessible.
For Maitland and his people simply breathing in the air could kill them. And it has.
For the first time, this disaster is centred from the perspective of Banjima. Maitland and his family’s fight to clean up their lands will inspire and catalyse.
This will be Maitland’s legacy – and YURLU | COUNTRY will immortalise 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.
