It’s a stunning, visceral first feature, announcing the director as a major talent to watch, and watch her movie you should.

| Sep 14, 2024

For such an emotive, topical subject it is remarkable the approach ISLAND OF THE HUNGRY GHOSTS not only takes, but succeeds with.

| Feb 13, 2020

Not only does the title of Brady's documentary sound like the name of a Apichatpong Weerasethakul film, but the eerie, snail-paced camera pans deep inside the jungle also seem to carry the Thai director's influence.

| Original Score: 7/10 | Feb 6, 2020

Affecting and disquieting, it's an audiovisual braided essay about displacement and the limits of empathy ... Hungry Ghosts, though, makes poetry of despair, inertia, failure...

| Dec 11, 2019

Paints a poetic, and at times chilling, portrait of life in transit, of a struggle for survival as old as time now playing-out in both the macro and the micro.

| May 18, 2019

This film is a powerful call for change regarding how Australia treats those who cross its borders seeking asylum.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 25, 2019

The film is beautifully photographed by Michael Latham, has an excellent music score by Aaron Cupples, and is never less than intriguing. But Brady's decision to withhold vital information from the viewer is rather self-defeating.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 15, 2019

...clever, innovative filmmaking from a director worth paying attention to.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 15, 2019

Island of the Hungry Ghosts casts an undeniably hypnotic spell. The documentary also serves as an important reminder that the United States is far from alone in mistreating its would-be immigrants.

| Mar 7, 2019

The result is at once acutely distressing and quite lovely, transforming the island into something primitive and inscrutable.

| Mar 7, 2019

The film is a haunting portrait of the island as a purgatorial realm between the poles of isolation and liberation.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 4, 2019

We get a sense of the place as a slightly eerie limbo, but the limits of the film's scope are frustrating.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 22, 2019

It's a potent, profoundly moving approach to an extensively covered subject. And it's a timely reminder that a society must be judged by the way it treats the desperate and vulnerable.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 13, 2019

This might almost be the island of The Tempest, a place with a stark message for humanity.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 10, 2019

A fierce, valuable, compassionate film.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 10, 2019

Aesthetically speaking, all the footage here is worthwhile, it's just the film makes its point a little too swiftly and obviously.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 10, 2019

Island of Hungry Ghosts focuses on Australia's questionable human rights record through a poetic and lyrical lens.

| Jan 8, 2019

While a subject like imprisonment and the exile of asylum seekers could succumb to Alan Jones style bullying, Island of the Hungry Ghosts chooses an altogether different route. It's a lure; a tug at your very soul.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 14, 2018

They are prisoners in all but name. Yet director Brady is also conscious of the fact that these stories are in danger of becoming white noise, just another story or film about refugees.

| Oct 31, 2018

Brady inspires an audience to lean in, with the accumulation of small details gradually adding up to something extraordinarily powerful.

| Aug 28, 2018