Joris Jvens

'Indonesia Calling: Joris Ivens in Australia' explores the historical context of Australia’s early relationship with its northern neighbour, and the impact made by this small film on emerging Australian documentary film culture.

The 400 million people of China are heirs to a great civilization, as their pagodas and stone lions can attest. But they are under attack from the Japanese. Civilian refugees walk, stumble, crawl to escape the destruction of their cities… While in the China of tradition, water buffalo still work the paddies and camels cross the desert, modern China is now a republic founded by Dr. Sun Yat-sen, with modern schools, heavy industry, large engineering projects…

On the border of North and South Vietnam, civilians live underground and cultivate their land in the dead of night, farmers take up arms, and bombs fall like clockwork. Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan's record of daily life in one of the most volatile regions of a war-torn, divided country is both a hazardous piece of first-hand journalism and a shattering work in its own right, simmering with barely repressed anger.

During some months, the Dutch movie director Ivens and some North Vietnamese colleagues filmed the life of North Vietnamese peasants under the menace of heavy American bombardments. The result is an indictment of all forms of war.