Olivia Mensah was a broadcast journalist in Sierra Leone before and during the civil war. Her work placed her in extraordinary danger: she became a political prisoner and, after fleeing West Africa, eventually rebuilt her life with her family in Tasmania.
But safety did not mean the past was finished. Three of Olivia's brothers remained stranded as refugees in West Africa, while the losses of war continued to shape the family she was trying to hold together in Australia.
A Family Divided follows Olivia as she accompanies a container of donated supplies back to Ghana, returns to the refugee camp she fought so hard to leave, reunites with her brothers and confronts the unresolved question beneath her new life: what does it actually mean to belong somewhere after everything that once made home possible has been fractured?
“I was constantly challenged by the need to juggle my own humanity with my need to deliver a film.”
The production unfolded over eight months and resisted a conventional schedule. Much of what happened outside the interviews was captured spontaneously as Olivia revealed more of her history and the filmmakers' understanding of the story changed. For Swindells, the central challenge became balancing the need to tell the story honestly with respect for the privacy and vulnerability of the people living it.
The film is grounded in Olivia's attempt to reconcile her past and reunite a family divided by war and displacement. At the same time, it opens onto the less visible realities of refugee settlement in Australia: isolation, public perception, fractured families, and the experience of beginning again in a country where an established professional identity may suddenly count for very little.
Writing ahead of the film's SBS broadcast, Daniel Mercer described Olivia's story as one of survival and a mission to reunite a fractured family, noting that the film also brought broader refugee issues in Australia into view.
Three decades of documentary filmmaking.