When I first heard that a film was being made about the murder of Australian journalists in East Timor in late 1975, I immediately thought of the film about the Cuban missile crisis, Thirteen Days. Directed by Australian Roger Donaldson, the film recreates actual meetings held during the crisis and produces a thriller.
The new film about the deaths of five journalists in Balibo in October 1975, followed by a sixth in December, could also have drawn on the mountain of material now available that reveals the diplomatic dirty tricks — and Australian and American complicity — in the invasion of East Timor and subsequent death toll of 183,000.
Instead, the first feature length film dealing with Indonesia's invasion of East Timor, and the deaths of these journalists, has missed an opportunity to inform the audience and thrill them at the same time.
As much as two thirds of the 111 minutes portrayed in Robert Connolly's film, Balibo, is fictionalised. Astute friends who have seen the film believed that the all of the events portrayed were real. After all, the promotional blurb says 'Based on a true story'. Even the experienced film reviewer Paul Byrnes fell for it, claiming the film was 'long on factual fidelity, short on movie hyperbole'.
For the record, here's a list of the following events in the film that are fiction:
The journalist Roger East was never cajoled out of his public service job by the young Fretilin foreign spokesman Jose Ramos Horta to work in East Timor, and nor did Ramos-Horta hand him an AUSTEO (Australian Eyes Only) dossier on the Balibo Five
East and Ramos-Horta never trekked on foot to Balibo, and nor were they attacked by a US helicopter along the way.
The Indonesians didn't attack up the hill in front of the Balibo fort, but from around the back of the village.
The senior commander of the Balibo operation, Colonel Dading Kalbuadi, didn't put a pistol to the head of the journalist Brian Peters and shoot him dead. He was 10 km away at the time.
East wasn't captured trying to send his last report from Dili's Marconi radio office.
And it's unlikely that General Benny Murdani, the Indonesian army intelligence chief, was observing the executions of East and Timorese people on the Dili wharf on 8 December, dressed in a white safari suit, though he did parachute into Dili some time that day.
For part of this