'I'm falling in your love' : cross-cultural romance and the refugee film

In Australia during the early 2000s, a number of films appeared, such as Fish Sauce Breath (Nguyen 2003), the Home Song Stories (Ayres 2007) and Donkey in Lahore (K-Rahber 2007), exploring the complexities of cross-cultural romantic love as the reflection of a confidently pluralistic society. At the same time, however, government support for the policy of multiculturalism, initiated in the 1970s, was in retreat. No events showed this more starkly than those surrounding ‘boat people’ during the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the asylum seekers’ ‘difference’ was used to illuminate their unsuitability to be given succour. The term ‘boat people’ has been used to refer to asylum-seekers who arrived on Australia’s shores seeking refuge since the first boatload from Vietnam arrived in 1976; in this chapter, it refers specifically to the wave of ‘boat people’ from 1998-2003, and who were mostly from Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq. Their arrival has usually caused great alarm in the Australian community and produced much public debate.