Film Festival 09 - Balibo
Balibo
Australia 2009, 105m
Director: Robin Connolly
Festivals: Melbourne 2009
When Indonesian forces invaded East Timor, newly independent of
Portugal, in 1975, the world turned a blind eye. Well, not quite.
Two Australian television channels had reporters on the ground.
Five of them - zealous young journos in their 20s, one of them,
Gary Cunningham, a New Zealander - ignored every warning and kept
their cameras rolling as the Indonesians made their advance on the
Fretilin base at Balibo. It was not until 2007 that a NSW coroner's
enquiry confirmed that the Balibo Five, as they have become known,
were not killed in crossfire, but trapped and coldly executed by
the invaders.
Director Robert Connolly (The Bank) mines a wealth of material
about First-World relationship to Third-World injustice from their
story and from the parallel story of Roger East, a seasoned
investigative journalist, who was persuaded by José
Ramos-Horta to travel to East Timor to find the missing men.
Ramos-Horta, eventual winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and first
President of Timor-Leste, is Ariel-like in his enticement of the
older man, and a volume could be written around the mutual
dependence of politicians and journalists embodied in the film's
dramatisation of their fractious relationship. Anthony LaPaglia is
magnificent as the aging lion and Oscar Isaac charismatically
elusive as freedom's gazelle.
Connolly keeps the tension relentless and never lets us lose sight
of the story that the Balibo Five sought to cover in the first
place. Balibo received funding assistance from the Melbourne
International Film Festival's Premiere Fund and will receive its
World Premiere screening on the Opening Night of MIFF on July 24.
We're honoured to be next in line.
In English and Portuguese, with English subtitles
