The opening night of any festival is always An Occasion - the opening night of the Melbourne International Film Festival especially so. Dapper gents in tuxedos and black ties, women in stunning gowns and shawls, filmmakers and actors and familiar faces in abundance spilling out across the many levels of Hamer Hall, and champagne flowing for all.
This year's festival opened with the traditional but for once relatively brief speeches by an array of dignitaries, including the welcome announcement by Premier Brumby that the Victorian government was supporting Victoria University's East Timor scholarship fund to the tune of $300,000, which will enable 10-15 Timorese students to study at VU in the coming months.
Speeches delivered, we sat back to watch the opening night film: the world premiere of director Robert Connolly's Balibo, a powerful account of a shameful episode in modern Australian history.
On October 16, 1975, five journalists - Malcolm Rennie and Brian Peters from Channel Nine, and Greg Shackleton, Gary Cunningham and Tony Stewart from Channel Seven - were murdered by Indonesian troops in the East Timor border town of Balibo. Another Australian journalist, Roger East, was executed a few weeks later, in Dili, when Indonesian troops invaded East Timor en masse.
The Australian government has never formally investigated the men's death, and at the time quietly accepted the Suharto regime's claim that the Five were caught and killed in crossfire between East Timorese and Indonesian troops. Nor did the Australian government protest Indonesia's subsequent invasion of East Timor: in fact it encouraged it, as revealed in diplomatic cables that were released in September 2000.
In 2007, a NSW coronial investigations into the death of camerman Brian Peters fround that "The Balibo Five ... were shot and or stabbed deliberately, and not in the heat of battle" in order to silence them from exposing Indonesia's invasion plans.
At least 100,000 people are estimated to have died as a result of Indonesia's 25-year occupation, which ended with East Timor's independence in 2002.
Balibo focuses on Roger East (Anthony LaPaglia), an experienced investigative journalist who is invited to East Timor by a young José Ramos-Horta (Oscar Isaac in the role of East Timor's future President) to head up the fledgling nation's News Agency. Instead, East sets out to discover what happened to the missing journalists.
Cutting between two timelines - East's own journey and the experiences of the Balibo Five - means that both stories are given equal measure, although I felt we never really got to know Shackleton (Damon Gameau) and his compatriots all that well. Was Shackleton a crusader obsessed with revealing the truth, or a naive fool who ignored the locals' warnings to flee while they could? The film doesn't really tell us enough to decide either way. Roger East's character, conversely, is extremely well drawn, flaws and all.
Juxtaposing a series of events in the same locations but seperated by a few weeks' time enables Connolly to contrast the mens' differing experiences with devestating effect, most poignantly in a sequence that cuts from Greg Shackleton's direct-to-camera report from "an unnamed village" in East Timor, to East's discovery of the same village, its residents massacred by Indonesian troops.
While Balibo initially plays out somewhat slowly, Connolly's use of dramatic tension is skillfull in the extreme, as is the evocation of the time and place in which the film is set. The film's political message about Australia's inaction over East Timor is always present but never overshadows the human drama played out on screen; and the use of a modern-day framing device to tell the tale, in the form of a testimony given to East Timor's Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation gives the film added poignancy.
The murder of the Five, when the awful moment comes, is truly confronting, although East's subsequent death is less powerful, and one of the few moments where this otherwise finely judged film slips into bathos.
Overall, Balibo is a powerful and important film; one that will inform a whole new generation of Australians about a dark day in our history; and one that reinforces the bond between Australia, and our island neighbour, the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste.
Rating: Four stars
Balibo is released nationally on August 13.
www.balibo.com.au
This is the first of a (hopefully daily) series of reviews I'll be posting from the 2009 Melbourne International Film Festival. Check back tomorrow for more mini-reviews.
No comments:
Post a Comment