AUSTRALIA – A guerrilla screening of secretly obtained film footage showing an unprecedented view of Australia’s offshore refugee detention camps was projected on to the outside of the Australian high commission in central London on Wednesday night.

The building became the backdrop to the screening of 20 minutes of footage from Chasing Asylum, a 1.5 hour documentary which breaks Australian law by using hidden-camera footage and testimony from whistleblowers inside the camp to describe the assaults, sexual abuse, self-harm attempts, child abuse and living conditions endured by asylum seekers held by the Australian government.

The picture they paint is one of routine dysfunction and deliberate cruelty, the Guardian reports.

“If women aren’t being raped in these detention camps, if children aren’t being abused and men aren’t losing their minds on Nauru and Manus, then why can’t journalists and independent observers go into the camps to see what’s going on?” said Eva Orner, the Academy and Emmy award-winning Australian documentary-maker who made Chasing Asylum.

Orner calls her documentary “the film Australia doesn’t want you to see”.

No journalist has ever been allowed to visit the two detention centres where intercepted refugees are taken. Both camps are far from Australia – one in Nauru, a small, impoverished Pacific island republic; the other in Papua New Guinea.

The documentary’s footage was clandestinely filmed during riots at the Manus and Nauru camps, which resulted in beatings and the death of Iranian asylum seeker Reza Berati.

In the middle of filming, the Australian government passed the Australian Border Force Act, which made it a crime, punishable by two years’ imprisonment, for whistleblowers to speak publicly.

“Why is it a crime with two years’ imprisonment for employees to talk about what goes on there? Why am I and my whistleblowers in breach of the law for telling the truth in our documentary?” said Orner, whose documentary features exclusive footage from inside Nauru and Manus detention centres and new whistleblower interviews.

The Guardian published all 8000 leaked pages of the Nauru Files – the largest cache of leaked documents released from inside Australia’s immigration regime, containing the personal accounts of sexual abuse, torture and humiliation inflicted on children held by Australia in offshore detention camps – earlier this year.

In August, the International Alliance Against Mandatory Detention organised a 10-hour reading of the 2000 leaked incident reports from the Nauru detention camp outside the high commission.

Chasing Asylum has already been a national and international triumph – it has won multiple awards, has secured European TV deals and will have US and UK deals soon.

There are DVDs, an iTunes release and streaming releases coming up as well as an announcement in the coming weeks concerning further international releases.

The documentary is to have its UK premiere this week with two screenings of the work at the London Film Festival.

Orner is in talks with the United Nations for screenings in Geneva and New York. It will be screened at the New York University law school later this year.

“Projecting our film on the Australian high commission isn’t just a stunt,” said Orner.

“This film has already been seen by thousands of people across Australia and will shortly be released far more widely and publicly, in a way that will mean it’s seen by millions of people in every corner of the globe.

“I’ll be able to announce the details over the next month but it’s going to be a very widely watched film.

“But despite us continuously asking the Australian government to comment on the claims made in our film about what’s happening on Nauru and Manus islands, the only time our politicians will comment is when the international media run the story, specifically the Guardian, the BBC and the New York Times. But even then, they refuse to engage properly: they’ve never answered the claims we make in the film.

“By projecting our film on to the high commission building in the centre of London, I’m hoping to goad Alexander Downer, the Australian high commissioner to the UK – who was an architect of the Pacific Solution and is a vocal supporter of them – to finally engage in a debate about what’s going on in them,” she said.

“I hope this film helps to educate and galvanise people to stand up and say this is unacceptable and to pressure the government to change its policies,” Orner said. - Guardian