In 2009, despite serious misgivings, filmmaker Tony Krawitz decided to venture onto Palm Island, off the Queensland coast, with a mission to reverse a coin of common perception to tell the lesser known side of a tragic story that began on November 19, 2004.
On an ordinary day, a drunken Aboriginal man, Cameron Doomadgee, was arrested for a minor infraction by towering white police officer Christopher Hurley, refered to by the locals as “the tall man”. Some 45 minutes later Doomadgee was dead in the local police station.
A subsequent post mortem report made reference to a slew of internal injuries including an almost split liver that are usually equated with those suffered by car-crash victims. In the ensuing weeks these startling medical facts reached the wider community. The reaction from the locals was a predictably primal encore. Both Hurley’s house and the police station were effectively reduced to cinders.
The Tall Man is compiled of affecting interviews with family, friends and other figures pertaining to the court cases that contorted the Queensland courts over a number of years. A sobering context, which details the blighted history of Palm Island, is also provided as a necessary counterpoint.
The director, using Chloe Hooper‘s book of the same name as the basis for his investigation, may be seen as blatant proselytising in orchestrating a campaign that refutes the innocence of Hurley. But by broadening the coverage of this tragedy, he confronts the ambiguities, allowing room for conclusions that any average person would naturally arrive at. Till now, it’s been the simplified newsworthy outcomes that form the basis of public knowledge a flawed, semi-blind perception reducing nuance to footnotes requiring hard work to identity.
The murky morality surrounding the guilt or innocence of this officer is complicated by dubious testimony from a drunken local, Hurley’s own untainted past record working in Aboriginal communities and the high probability of conspiratorial manipulation by the Palm Island officers and their superiors the kind of behaviour that magnetically draws suspicion when brought to light.
The Tall Man (2011) is a superb documentary offering an impassioned, humane perspective of Doomadgee’s story whilst keeping away from the emotional fuse that, once lit, might unnaturally skewer audience reaction. The failings of the legal system are rightfully put under the microscope: who does it really serve and why? Krawitz has produced a compelling real life tale that, reduced down to its basic components, whether factual or inferential, underlines only a sense of its pervasive sadness.
I say:
An absorbing look, from a new perspective, at a truly tragic case which saw the pointless, totally preventable pointless loss of a human life.
See it for:
The humanistic angle, eliminating legal jargon and court rulings to the true cost of tragedy.
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