Driving around all night in a taxi in a nameless city with faceless streets, Ali is on an unknown journey with elderly woman Esther who can't remember where to go while he cannot forget his trauma.
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Damage, a feature-long independent Australian film directed by Madeleine Blackwell, casts Ali Al Jenabi, an Iraqi asylum seeker who was convicted as a people smuggler in Australia, and the director's mother Imelda Bourke.
Mr Al Jenabi was sceptical at first but attracted by Ms Blackwell's artistic intentions about representing refugees in a more complex light.
"I had no experience acting at all but Madeleine convinced me that this story of an asylum seeker was important," he told AAP.
"Many Australians don't understand why people seek asylum here, why they are forced to leave their homelands and the problems they face when they come here and their lives."
Mr Al Jenabi, 52, was jailed for two years as part of Saddam Hussein's tyrannical reign in the early 1990s and then fled with his family to Iran.
He had applied as a refugee with the UN refugee agency for years before heading to Indonesia.
Working his way through the people smuggling networks in Indonesia where traffickers made exorbitant amounts of money, he saw an opening to not charge as much and get desperate people onto boats.
He smuggled people for two years between 1999 to 2001 before being caught by Australian Federal Police in a bust in Thailand.
He was then flown to Darwin to stand trial where a judge in 2003 found that he was not motivated by profit but by humanitarian reasons, thereby reducing his sentence.
After serving his time in jail and a couple of years in Villawood Immigration Detention Centre, he was released in 2008 and has been on a bridging visa since.
The window installer would fly to Adelaide to film for days at a time with Ms Blackwell, where he was a natural.
The film has screened at international festivals including in Barcelona and San Francisco.
It is playing for the first time with Arabic subtitles at Parramatta Riverside Theatres in multicultural western Sydney until March 3.
"This film is full of absolute facts like a documentary but it is two human beings who are not acting, they're playing themselves but in a fictional situation," Ms Blackwell said.
"It's about two human beings who are quite hostile to each other but soon inside the taxi they begin to understand each other."
She praised Mr Al Jenabi's poetic skills of delivering and improvising his lines and his on-screen charisma.
For Mr Al Jenabi, acting is a way of humanising refugees through his lived experience.
"The message I wanted to share with Australian audiences (through acting) is that people who seek asylum here are just like you - they have homes and families," he said.
"When people say they jumped on a boat and came here, they don't fully grasp that when you see the gravity of the sea and a rickety wooden boat like a drop in the ocean ... that's a big risk.
"It's not a joke. It's not something easy to sacrifice your life not knowing what the future holds."
Australian Associated Press
