THE BATTLE OF DOONGMABULLA SPRINGS (2025)
Director: Chris Phillips
Executive producer(s): Monica Garnsey
Producer(s): BBC World Service / BBC Eye
Editing: Rebecca Way
Duration: 90 mins
World Premiere UK Sheffield Docfest 2025 June 19
https://www.sheffdocfest.com/film/life-50c-battle-doongmabulla-springs
From BBC’s Life At 50°C strand, which looks at lives on the frontline of climate change, the film is set in Australia’s coal country.
The BBC World Service project Life At 50°C found that the number of extremely hot days every year, when the temperature reaches 50 degrees centigrade, has doubled since the 1980s. This returning series tells the stories of people on the frontline of climate change, sometimes made worse by conflict or pollution. Combining character-led stories, visual extremes and journalistic investigation, recent films were from South Sudan, Syria and Colombia. This new feature-length documentary is set in the coal country of Queensland, where life at 50°C is now a reality, but the economy is fuelled by coal mining. It’s an intimate portrait of lives inextricably linked to a new mine.
RELATED WORK
Anxiety is the most common group of mental disorders experienced by Australians aged 16 to 85, according to the latest ABS figures.i Could psychedelic assisted therapy hold the answer to our mental illness epidemic? This is the question explored in Psychedelics: Stepping into the Unknown – the thrilling final instalment in the third season of Australia Uncovered.
As the head of Australia’s first clinical psychedelic laboratory, Dr Paul Liknaitzky is fast emerging as a leader in this ground-breaking area of research. In a world first, Dr Liknaitzky and his team at Monash University trial the use of psilocybin (the active ingredient found in ‘magic mushrooms’) in psychedelic assisted therapy to treat Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD). For two years, Psychedelics: Stepping into the Unknown is granted exclusive access to what unfolds.
We meet the participants before their treatment begins and witness their daily struggles living with anxiety. We follow them through treatment, including extraordinary psychedelic dosing sessions, and intense and intimate therapy. Their experiences are raw, courageous, and life changing.
After two eventful years, the trial concludes, and the brave participants reflect on the impact it has had on their lives. For Dr Liknaitzky, the Monash team and the many Australians seeking relief from their mental health struggles, the future of psychedelic therapy is only just beginning.
Although tribal fighting has long been present in the Papua New Guinea highlands, the influx of modern automatic weaponry in the 1990s turned local disputes into swift lethal exchanges which threatened to permanently reshape highlands culture.
Bootlegged copies of the American film Rambo circulated in remote communities, becoming a crude tutorial on the use
of such weaponry. The influence of the film was so pronounced that the term Rambo is now used in Papuan dialects to describe hired mercenaries who are paid to support local combatants in violent tribal disputes. The services of Rambos were suddenly in high demand as a variety of M16s and Indonesian military weaponry found its way down the Sepik River through swap-laden smuggling routes.