Adopting Ali
Letters to Ali
dir. Clara Law
‘One day I picked up my DV camcorder and followed Trish and her family, travelling 6000km across Australia through a desert to a remote detention centre, to visit an Afghan boy with whom they had been exchanging letters for 18 months.’ Clara Law (Floating Life, 1996, The Goddess of 1967, 2000) accompanies the Kerbi/Silberstein family on one of their extraordinary journeys to Port Hedland to see a boy called Ali, who came to Australia as an unaccompanied asylum seeker.
Letters to Ali continues Clara Law’s preoccupation with identity and migration. Ali is a 15-year-old Afghan boy who is in mandatory detention at Port Hedland. Tarkovsky called making films sculpting in time: Clara Law is a species of director who carves away at her subject with a sort of relentless gentleness. The film starts with a series of personal statements in text followed by stunningly simple imagery. Law’s amazement at having her own garden after growing up in Macau and Hong Kong reminds us of Australia’s ‘we’ve boundless plains to share’. This eventually resonates with why Trish Kerbi started to experience nausea whenever she heard Advance Australia Fair.
In the end this film is not just about its title subject, but about the Kerbi-Silberstein family and how Australia has become a country in which they no longer feel at home. Trish Kerbi was the instigator of the letters to a number in Port Hedland that turned out to be a 15-year-old boy. She is a country GP, living in a sprawling, self-built house on a few acres with her husband and four kids, horses, ducks, dogs and cats. It is an image of rational paradise, of being surrounded by natural beauty, living the productive and rewarding life. Her kids are like Aussie spring lambs, frolicking in a life of security and unconditional love. They grow healthily for themselves and for others: they are able to extend their privilege to the egregiously deprived Ali. To Trish, her husband Rob Silberstein and their kids, extending their good fortune in life to someone so much less lucky, is a natural thing, a genuine commitment. In writing and receiving the letters they come to know him as a person and Trish soon becomes ‘Mum’ to Ali.
They try to adopt him as their son, to make him an official part of their family, and run into the predictable problems that are