W I D E R SCREENINGS TM presents...
AUSTRALIAN CINEMA / DVD
BALIBO (2009)
FOOTPRINT FILMS
d. Robert Connolly; pr. Anthony LaPaglia, John Maynard, Rebecca Williamson; scr. Robert Connolly, David Williamson; ph. Tristan Milani; m. Lisa Gerrard; ed. Nick Meyers; cast. Anthony LaPaglia, Oscar Issac, Nathan Phillips, Gyton Grantley, Damon Gameau, Tom Wright, Paul Sonkkila, Mark Winter (111 mins)
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Robert Connolly stakes Bold New Territory for the Australian Political Thriller
Balibo is a triumphant Australian film, the first in a considerable time to assess a political incident with important repercussions for the nation’s sense of selfhood and independence.
At once a political thriller and a study of journalistic ethics in the tradition of such American films as Oliver Stone’s Salvador and Roger Spottiswoode’s Under Fire, Balibo marks the return of noted playwright and screenwriter David Williamson to the subject of Indonesian politics, which Williamson had first tackled for director Peter Weir in 1982’s The Year of Living Dangerously a film which had to be relocated from the Philippines to Australia following Islamic terror threats accompanying its initial filming. It was then one of a select few Australian films to examine journalistic ethics – Newsfront, The Journalist, Heatwave and The Killing of Angel Street foremost amongst them (although Graham Kennedy had played an Aussie journalist in Cambodia for The Killing Fields). Weir’s film (with a pre-international stardom Mel Gibson as a journalist) was set during the Sukarno upheavals whereas director Robert Connelly’s Balibo is set some years later during the Suharto regime’s brutal invasion of the independence-seeking Portuguese colony of East Timor. Just as the political thriller form enabled Weir to segue from Australian cinema to Hollywood moviemaking in his subsequent Witness, Balibo is now poised to make an internationally renowned figure out of Australian director Robert Connolly.
THEATRICAL TRAILER
Born in Sydney, Connolly made his mark as a director with two invigorating and diverse thriller-dramas – 2001’s The Bank and 2005’s Three Dollars – both in their way assessments of human ethical conduct. After producing duties on 2007’s Romulus, My Father Connolly came to work with Williamson on Balibo, easily the most ambitious and creatively successful Australian film of the early 21st Century.
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Journalistic Ethics, Roger East and the Mythification of Nobel Prize-Winner Jose Ramos-Horta
As Williamson this time withheld any romantic asides (as had plagued The Year of Living Dangerously by his own admission) Connolly, re-teamed with The Bank star Anthony LaPaglia and brilliantly utilizing authentic East Timorese non-actors in supporting roles, succeeded in turning Balibo into a complex assessment of Australian identity, international human rights responsibility, the cynical toll of idealistic humanism in a world of political indifference and a stunning addition to the recent spate of films in which the journalistic crusade for the truth comes head to head against political double-dealing (with Australian Russell Crowe playing one such idealistic journalist in Kevin MacDonald’s 2009 State of Play). However, Balibo gains most from its twofold willingness to uncompromisingly examine an Australian tragedy in terms of the humanist and political oppositions in the recreation of a true story the end political result of which may yet be international war crimes proceedings.
In Balibo, a young Jose Ramos-Horta (a captivating Oscar Isaac) visits Darwin in 1975 to recruit seasoned journalist Roger East (Anthony LaPaglia). Ramos-Horta has read East’s work in some detail – in one of many subtle scenes of respectful bonding between the two men, Ramos-Horta remarks on East’s writing in South Africa which East immediately puts down as “rugby and cricket” prompting Ramos-Horta to remind him about his writing on Apartheid. East gradually responds to Ramos-Horta’s political idealism: Ramos-Horta’s youth, knowledge and political conviction to his nation awakens East from an uncomfortable period of listless inactivity. Ramos-Horta has a proposition for East: to head East Timor’s independent media (with as minimal government interference as possible – both men are savvy enough to know the limitations of even a “free press”). East is reluctant until he hears from Ramos-Horta that five Australian journalists (from channels 7 and 9) were sent and are missing / presumed dead. Now sensing a story, East accompanies Ramos-Horta to Portuguese Timor (abandoned by the Portuguese) as Indonesian war ships gather off the coast for an imminent invasion. With Ramos-Horta’s aid, East retraces the steps of the Aussie journalists (known in Australian history as the “Balibo 5”) to the site of the invasion, the small border community of Balibo. The story of these journalists is revealed in flashback scenes, fleshing out the drama in terms of the narrative inter-relationship between present and recent past, signalled through judicious match-cutting.
Director Connolly’s constant hand-held camerawork and the subtle cinematographic distinction between present and past (the flashbacks signalled by and well integrated within clever location work) creates an unrelenting immediacy underscoring Williamson’s lean script. Steadily paced and with a mounting sense of foreboding, Balibo unfolds as Australia’s finest political thriller to date, as chilling in its depiction of an Australian tragedy as it is provocative in its off-screen insinuations.
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ROBERT CONNOLLY TALKS
ON AUSSIE FILM INNOVATION
Implying Australian Government Complicity in the Indonesian Invasion of East Timor
The fate of the five journalists is well known to Australian audiences but still comes as a shock, especially considering the hints that the filmmakers leave concerning Australia’s indifference to the human rights crisis, its support of the cruel Suharto military regime and even its complicity in East’s individual fate – after Ramos-Horta and East are shot at by a low-flying Indonesian helicopter (purchased from the Americans and paid for in British pounds), Ramos-Horta tells East that the Australian government has been supplying the Indonesians with intelligence.
The implication here is truly significant – Australian compliance in the fate of the Balibo 5 (or at least in that of East): indeed, on the informative official website accompanying the film is an extract from a formerly secret communiqué sent between Jakarta and Canberra from Aussie embassy staff which reads:
“President Suharto has recently authorized a significant increase in Indonesian involvement… the stepped-up operation begins today, as you know (italics added)… all Indonesian forces operating in Portuguese Timor will be dressed as members of the anti-Fretilin force… it is of course clear that the presence of Indonesian forces of this order will become public… the President’s policy will be to deny any reports of the presence of Indonesian forces in Portuguese Timor… meanwhile Indonesia will continue to portray its policy in as favourable a light as possible on the diplomatic and public presentational level… on the basis of the Townsville talks, President Suharto will assume that the Australian Government will make every effort to give Indonesia what support and understanding it can. The Prime Minister’s statement in the House of Representatives on 26 August confirmed this assumption. An example of the Indonesian government’s confidence is the extent to which it keeps us informed of its secret plans. There is no doubt in my mind that the Indonesian government’s fundamental assessment is based on the talks between Mr. Whitlam and President Suharto in Townsville.” (Secret Australian Eyes Only Priority cable from Australian Embassy Jakarta to Canberra dated 15th October 1975)
Australian Labour Prime Ministers Whitlam, Hawke and Keating all supported Suharto’s occupation of East Timor which, according to the facts which close Balibo, led to the deaths of over 183,000 East Timorese people from the 1975 invasion through to the nation’s independence in 1999. Current Australian Labour Prime Minister Kevin Rudd may consider the fate of the Balibo 5 important enough to investigate but the unresolved and tantalizing question of war criminal complicity hangs over this intention to see justice done and infiltrates the unfolding action throughout the film of Balibo.
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Political "truth", Journalistic Responsibility and the Legacy of Australian Human Rights Ethics
The juxtaposition between Ramos-Horta and East is telling. At its simplest level it contrasts two political idealists from successive generations. Symbolically, the younger man Ramos-Horta is told by the older, cynical East (who repeatedly claims that he is too old to meet the responsibility demanded of him though eventually accepts it in the name of what he considers “truth”) to set the pace when the two of them walk: the future belongs to the young idealist.
Indeed, although the film concerns the Australian East, it is Ramos-Horta who emerges as the most dynamic and passionate figure, kept off-screen for a significant amount of time. Dressed in fatigues and with an unshaven appearance that reminds the viewer of a young Che Guevara (although the political party Ramos-Horta represented, the Fretilin, repeatedly denied accusations of being communist and questioned why no investigation was done by the Australians before levelling such dismissive allegations) Ramos-Horta is clearly a figure in a revolutionary tradition, and allied in spirit if not political affiliation to Latin American leftist causes. But each men’s plight is tied to their respective nationhood – both cry over the deaths of East Timorese innocents but East, when pressured by Ramos-Horta that he cares more about the fate of five Australians than an entire nation of Timorese, responds that the media do not care about the fate of “brown people” but that the story of 5 dead white journalists will make front page headlines worldwide and thus bring attention to their cause. Such is the ironic, cynical political reality which informs the journalistic pursuit of objective truth.
Instances such as this belie Connolly and Williamson’s brilliant craftsmanship, the subtly integrated and repeated stress on the indifference from the international community (the UN are glimpsed only briefly at the film’s conclusion) to what is often dismissed (or lumped) together as Third World politics. Yet Williamson and Connelly end the film with a devastating blow to the Australian pride that East clings to throughout, making East’s fate a humbling blow to Australian self-importance and exemplary of the ultimate political futility and human cost of that same self-importance – East’s bold pronouncement “I’m Australian” is ultimately of little importance to the military might of Suharto’s forces, and this proud Aussie is as insignificant as a pest to be disposed of. The fate of the Balibo 5 and of East thus emerges as: 1) an indictment of the Suharto regime and militarist politics; 2) an indictment of Australian (and UN) indifference to the invasion and occupation of a tiny nation; and 3) an ironic but always humanist portrait of what Australia considers as a national tragedy. Balibo is in that sense a film about Australia’s political betrayal of its ideals: Connolly and Williamson infer a nation unwilling and unable to meet its international obligations under UN human rights laws and willing to support an unjust invasion to the point of jeopardizing the security of its own journalist-citizens or political expediency.
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Humanism in the Face of Wearied Cynicism
That is not to say that Balibo is a film without essential human warmth for it is that quality that truly humanizes this political thriller. Indeed, the surrounding flashback structure – in addition, East’s story is framed by the reminiscence of an East Timorese woman about the days she met East when she was a child – makes for a densely layered narrative which stresses the humanist nature of personal experience: the importance of the personal testimonial as historical legacy over and above official accounts is stressed by this film’s narrative structural emphasis on qualitative journalism.
Thus, Balibo is an emotionally affecting (and harrowing) political thriller in which humane empathy is fore-grounded in opposition to political indifference at best and hostility at worst. Connolly and Williamson even allow themselves a moment or two of sly humour, as when East teaches the Timorese little girl (whose reminiscence begins the film) to toss a coin and gives her an Aussie coin upon seeing which she asks (in her innocent way) what the Queen of England is doing on Australian currency, a sly note of irony for the implicitly Republican East. The Timorese (portrayed by non-actors) are treated with individuality and dignity, respect for their culture and humanity quietly and cumulatively emerging as the narrative (by necessity as an Australian film) nevertheless concentrates on the fate of the Balibo 5. Indeed, Ramos-Horta makes the point to East that the Timorese people are touched by his efforts to uncover the truth of what happened to his countrymen and have come forward to assist him. Thus, East decides – when Ramos-Horta is called upon to leave Timor and represent his nation from abroad and in exile – to remain in Dili to document the invasion and tell Ramos-Horta’s story, a noble ambition ultimately crushed by the weight of military and political expediency as, it is implied, is all humanism.
The inter-dependence of East and Ramos-Horta as journalist and idealist of course speaks to current ties between Australia and East Timor, with Aussie peace-keeping troops recently on the ground there – the nations now have a shared past and joint responsibility borne of the most regrettable of political attitudes. But the situation today is radically different to that of 1975 and Balibo depicts one of Australia’s most notorious episodes (the Balibo 5) as both a national tragedy and an implied (and still unresolved) national shame as well as an ironic comeuppance about Australia’s sense of pride in its own political importance in the region.
Balibo premiered in July 2009 at the Melbourne International Film Festival (where it was followed by a Q&A session with director Connolly and a visiting Ramos-Horta) and goes into mass Australian release in August 2009.
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