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Balibo

Posted by dave c (A) on August 16, 2009 at 19:27:55

Balibo opened here this week and I had held over seeing it from the closing night of the film festival.
We went in on a brilliantly sunny late winter day and came out needing a drink.
If you have heard of this film then I am guessing you know what it is about, so I will mention some of the things in the film that make it what it is.
It is about the hunt by an Australian journalist for what happened to 5 other journalists in East Timor during the Indonesian invasion.
Anthony LaPaglia is very good portraying the crusty cynical journo dragged into the moment and trying to speak out.
Actually I think he is more than very good.
There is a newsreel feel to a lot of the footage, much of which I assume is old TV footage.
This gives the film an on the run look which suits it.
Some of the camera work is beyond hand held as if it were taken by the participants diving into ditches to hide and conveys their desperation.
The film covers one small part of a much bigger picture which to the film's credit it doesn't try to explain.
But at one point Jose Ramos Horta turns to the journalist and says something like "that was an American helicopter paid for with British money and they know you are here because of intelligence given to them by your Australian government".
This is not a film for staunch unquestioning nationalists among the English speakers here!
Here in Australia it happened under Whitlam, the left wing government infamously sacked by the governor general.
But it is also the story of an ageing man whose life and urgency have slipped away and who finds himself in this most twisted of intrigues.
By the end he chooses to stay behind knowing his probable fate and has a crisis leaving an uneasy parallel to Jesus...
The world politics are for another day and this at heart is about a group of young TV people of almost pathetic naivety and an old man who finds a personal redemption.
The genocide after the events in the film ranks as horrific in terms of percentages of population killed as any of the 20thC, and yet all the while the world looked away.
Some parts of the film are horribly violent, dirty ugly violent with no glamour attached which is as it should be.
At one point I realised all the usual audience noises had stopped as if everyone was holding their breath so as not to be found there...
I don't really know how good this film is; it's so emotionally charged.
NO one moved when it finished but I could see quite a number of people wiping tears from their eyes.
It is about an incident over which at least those of us from English speaking nations (US/UK/Oz) (and Portugal) should hang their heads in shame.
It is about politics and power (mainly oil) and the nature of things in Asia.

On a day when I heard on the radio that the USA had actively supported 25 military coups in the last 50 years in Central America alone, the actual quality of this as a film seems somehow irrelevant.
There is an ugliness in the world that we too often choose to turn away from.
And this is a case where if we do not learn from history we will most certainly be doomed to repeat it again and again.
Just see it.

Here is a link to the first part of a documentary about this event, you will have to search YouTube for the rest.

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0GXaDjdaWM   (Open in New Window)

Edits: 08/16/09 08/16/09

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