Wave of woe

December 26 will mark the 10th anniversary of the Boxing Day tsunami, the most devastating natural disaster of modern times, in which more than 225,000 people died across 13 South-East Asian countries.

In 2004, the newspaper stories were there for all of us to see, documenting the tragedy in words and images.

But times move on, and so do newspaper headlines. The front pages gradually turned to other subjects but for those who lost loved ones that day - and for the professionals who moved in to help recover bodies and rebuild shattered towns and villages - the aftermath would last much longer.

After the Wave is a powerful, at times difficult-to-watch documentary on the forensic operation that unfolded in Thailand, one of the countries hardest hit by the tsunami, in the months and years that followed.

Directed and produced by Australian- born, UK-based BBC and Channel 4 documentary filmmaker Amanda Blue, it follows the journey both of the Australian forensic team, who worked in collaboration with other teams from all over the world, and the individuals who had lost - or found - loved ones after the raging waters had subsided.

"This is a film I passionately wanted to make," Blue says. "My husband and I had been in Krabi on honeymoon literally four months before the tsunami. I was lucky, and for many tourists a lot of it was about being in a certain place and a certain time. I felt the universality of that: it could have been anyone I know, anyone I cared for, lying on those beaches."

After the Wave features heartbreaking interviews with the families and partners of tourists from the US, Sweden, France and the UK, as well as one Thai local who was only a 12-year-old boy when the tsunami hit.

"About 18 months ago I read this firsthand account of surviving the tsunami and it really struck me as so incredibly powerful," Blue explains.

"I started thinking about how people dealt with that tragedy. The things that people did for each other - incredible acts of kindness and bravery between complete strangers - made me think about a film that focused on the connections people made with each other on that day."

Further research lead Blue to explore the story of those entrusted with the unenviable job of identifying bodies and, where possible, repatriating them to their homelands or back to their families.

The tsunami recovery process was a massive international operation - spearheaded by the Australian Federal Police forensic team - which saw experts from 30 different nations eventually abandon their country's directives to only look for their own citizens and work together to identify more than 4000 victims from 40 different countries across a five-year period.

"I felt this was a part of the story that hadn't really been told, and the tsunami generally - given the magnitude of it - had really not been documented that widely," Blue says.

"Films have been made (2012's The Impossible, starring Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor) but if you compare it to something like 9/11, it just hasn't been marked in the same way."

Blue says she only interviewed people who didn't need to be persuaded to talk on camera about their experiences of having survived, or lost loved ones to, the tsunami.

"These are people who had already been through so much trauma, so they really had to want to do it," she says.

"The most difficult person to interview was Patrice, the French father who lost his partner and baby daughter, because he'd never told his story before. We started off Skyping - I was in London, he was living in San Francisco - and then he encouraged me to come to San Francisco and hang out with him. He needed to know he could trust me. We spent two days just walking around and talking, and by the end of that he was ready to tell his story."

Blue sounds surprised when I ask how making the documentary affected her personally. "Gosh, no one's really ever asked me that," she laughs.

"It was huge. I am relieved I've finished it now, because I had dreams about it for so long. I'd be doing these intensive interviews and then going back to my hotel room and replaying the footage . . . it was heavy but I feel like I've honoured the memory of those who died, and those who survived were treated with dignity."

'Films have been made but if you compare it to something like 9/11, it just hasn't been marked in the same way.'