Action faction version of Indonesian aggression

OneWorld UK

By Daniel Nelson

Is it ok to make a feature film about a true story? This often-replayed controversy is reopened by Balibo, a dramatic telling of the murder of six Australian journalists by Indonesian forces when they invaded East Timor in 1975.

Journalist John Pilger thinks the film is a travesty. Writing in the magazine Sight and Sound, he says the “true story” depicted by the film is largely fictitious. His argument is that the “the Australian government’s complicity in the journalists’ murder – and, above all, in a bloodbath greater proportionately than that perpetrated by Pol Pot in Cambodia – has been cut almost entirely.”

That’s true. The baddy in the film is Indonesia, which is fair enough because Jakarta’s annexation of East Time when the Portuguese colonial administration withdrew, its murderous reign there and its orchestration of the calamitous pre-independence violence is totally, unforgivably reprehensible. Pilger’s argument is that the role of Australia, the US and Britain in giving Jakarta the green light is excluded.

But a film can’t do everything. This one chooses to focus on the drama and excitement of the story rather than the geopolitics. The advantage of such an approach is that it is likely to attract bigger audiences than a documentary and thus bring a little known, shocking and important episode from recent history to a wider audience. Perhaps as a result some members of that audience will be prompted to find out more about the West’s participation in Indonesia’s brutal takeover.

We know what film Pilger would have preferred, because he showed us in his 1993 documentary, Death of a Nation: the Timor Conspiracy.

Is there a middle way, in which some of the slightly overblown scenes in Balibo could have been cut and replaced by a few more historical truths – which were included in early versions of the script?

For example, a comment in a short but unusually intelligent online discussion of the film on Eyes Wired Open (http://eyeswiredopen.blogspot.com/2009/08/pilger-head-butts-balibo.html) picks out a superfluous swimming pool scene which seems to be included to enable Australian viewers to make emotional links with the journalists.

Another comment suggests, “As much as I admire Pilger I think in this instance he has made the classic mistake of judging a film for not being the film he wanted to see, rather than judging it for what it actually is. Should there be a film about the Australian government's complicity in what happened? Yes - but it's not this film and this film never claims to be a definitive film.”

My own concern with films like this is that they are so vivid, so “real”, that once seen you cannot get the images out of your mind. You might know in your head that what you have seen is not what happened, but it seeps into your consciousness and is almost impossible to eradicate.

I am happy that thousands of people’s awareness of what happened in East Timor will be increased by the film, but I prefer my history in documentary form, unvarnished by the need to lure and excite audiences and by imaginative versions of people and events. But of course documentaries are subjective and selective with the facts and are edited to maintain the viewers’ interest…

+ There’s an interesting link between two of the films at the festival. Balibo is about the Indonesian invasion and occupation of East Timor, which finally ended with a temporary UN administration under Sergio Vieira de Mello, and an election leading to independence. Sergio is about de Mello’s death in a bomb blast in the UN headquarters in Iraq: the man responsible for the attack said it was revenge for “the criminal” Sergio’s role in separating Timor from Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim nation.

Balibo is showing at the London Film Festival, at the Vue Leicester Square, on 20, 21 and 22 October

* Balibo – film v fiction>