Safe Harbour – Review

Genre: Drama
Cast: Ewen Leslie, Leeanna Walsman, Phoebe Tonkin, Joel Jackson, Hazem Shammas, Nicole Chamoun, Robert Rabiah, and Jacqueline McKenzie.
Safe Harbour begins with an event and follows the ripples across different families and cultural backgrounds. The story revolves around a group of five friends who find themselves in a dilemma. While on a sailing holiday, they encounter a boat of refugees who are stranded on the open water and are desperate to make it to Australia. After a vote, the group agrees to attempt to tow the boat to safety, but things don’t go as planned.
Convincing themselves the asylum seekers had cut themselves loose and taken the dinghy and life jackets, they say nothing. Years later, one of the refugees, Ismail, finds the friends in Brisbane. Ismail is now a cab driver and wants justice for what happened — he says the Australians deliberately cast them off and, consequently, seven people died. The story alternates between the night at sea and the actions taken or avoided by the Australians on the yacht and some years later when the asylum seekers are now making lives in Brisbane where the story is set.
While this series does touch on hot topics surrounding refugees and the right to seek asylum in Australia, the message does not feel overly political or grandstanding. Instead, the show quickly dives directly to the core of what is fundamentally a human rights issue.
The political minefield of illegal immigration is made for screen storytelling. It is in the building of character and the representation of people who are in many ways “just like us” encountering moral challenges, which allows us to feel empathy.
The good part about this being a miniseries as opposed to an hour or so film, is that we understand their characters’ thought process and see who they were before/after these events.
Part psychological thriller, part mystery, and part family drama, Safe Harbour raises a few moral questions that you’ll have to settle yourself, apart from the answers you will seek as a viewer that are answered within the four-episode arc. This is perhaps the greatest strength of the program and makes it worth a watch.
Safe Harbour is now streaming on Hulu.
> Mar Martínez