Too young to understand the difficulties of the immortal question "Are We Officially Dating?" Hazara Children by Balazs Gardi/cc
By Situation Theatre 24/2/14
Hot on the heels of their successful “Light the Dark” protests last night, GetUp! have today snagged Hollywood hunk Zac Efron to illuminate the plight of refugees in his activist film debut.
Efron will play Jason, a dreamy New York party boy who is kidnapped and forced to experience life amongst Afghanistan’s most oppressed peoples.
Already worried about “that awkward moment” when a girl wants to get serious and you don’t, Jason’s troubles are compounded when he is rendered to Quetta, Pakistan, and as a Shiite Muslim, faces random acts of violence from Sunni radical group Lakshar-e-Jhangvi.
Later in the film that sinking feeling Jason has off the Indonesian coast stirs memories of that sinking feeling back in New York when he discovered his best friend had a girlfriend even though they’d agreed on a pact to stay single.
Finally, Jason’s torturous decision to refuse to attend a funeral important to a girl he was seeing, for fear that would mean they were an “item”, is echoed in his torturous and terrifying experiences of rape, physical abuse, self-harm and depression on Manus Island.
The film is set to expose the true horror of Australia’s treatment of refugees, the thought that such brutal policies could be applied to white people.