Australia's Forgotten Islands (2018)
There is a corner of the Indian Ocean so remote that, by Benjamin Pederick's own account, no film had ever been made there before he turned up with a camera. That fact alone stopped me in my tracks. The Cocos (Keeling) Islands are an Australian territory most of us could not begin to place on a map, and "Australia's Forgotten Islands" uses them to tell a quietly fascinating story that I suspect very few people outside those islands have ever heard told.
The setup is deceptively simple. There are two communities here, living in close proximity but in genuinely separate worlds. On one island, the descendants of Malay and Indonesian labourers brought over generations ago to work the coconut and banana plantations, maintaining a distinct Islamic culture, their own rhythms, their own sense of identity. On the other, a more white, mainland-Australian population, including the descendants of the very people who once owned the ancestors of their neighbours across the water. It is, when you sit with it for a moment, a quietly staggering thing to contemplate.
What Pederick does well, and this is not always easy to pull off, is let the islanders carry the film themselves. He does not arrive with a thesis and bend the footage to fit it. The plantation past, the faith, the daily life, the strange and delicate business of two peoples with such an unequal shared history learning to coexist, part together and part apart: all of it is allowed to breathe at its own pace. There is a great deal packed in here, about identity, class, colonial legacy and the long shadows that an arrangement built on exploitation casts down through the generations, and it never once tips into a lecture. That restraint is the film's real achievement.
I have developed a genuine soft spot for these dispatches from the forgotten edges of the map. Films that take you somewhere almost no one goes, and show you a human story you would never otherwise encounter. I loved A Thousand Suns (2013) for exactly that quality, and "Australia's Forgotten Islands" sits in similar company. It reminds you how many quietly extraordinary communities exist just off the edge of the world most of us pay attention to.
Technically, the film carries itself with real assurance. The photography is handsome, the score is judged well, and the whole thing has a polish that belies what must have been a very modest budget. None of that is guaranteed when you are making a small, off-the-beaten-track documentary about a place this obscure, and it matters. A rough, scrappy version of this film could easily have undermined the story it was trying to tell.
If it stops a touch short of greatness, it is only because it is, by its nature, a modest and fairly niche piece. There are moments where you feel it could push a little harder into the uncomfortable corners of that colonial hangover, where the tension between the two communities might have been examined with a slightly sharper edge. But that is a mild complaint about a film that never set out to be polemical, and mostly gets the balance just right.
As a window onto a place and a history that almost nobody knows the first thing about, it is close to invaluable. Three and a half stars, and a quietly excellent little documentary from the very ends of the earth.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2018 | Watched: 2026-09-03
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Physical: Amazon US
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