Balibo

Every country has local stories that become major myths, fables in which there are no surviving witnesses to separate fact and fiction. In Balibo, an East Timorese village near the Indonesian border, five Australian journalists went missing, presumed killed, in 1975 during the invasion of the former Portuguese colony by Jakarta's military forces.

The 2009 docudrama chronicles their last few days in tandem with the story of the Australian foreign correspondent, Roger East, who followed their jungle tracks four weeks later. Based on a damning expose, the screenplay (co-written by playwright David Williamson) depicts East (Anthony Lapaglia) as a surprisingly emotional veteran who accepted an offer to head up the self-proclaimed independent republic's official news agency. The offer was made, in Darwin, by the new nation's young foreign minister (and eventual president) Jose Ramos-Horta, portrayed as a shrewdly pragmatic Che lookalike by Oscar Isaac (between other starring roles as Agora's Orestes and Robin Hood's King John).

In this version of the tragic fable, Horta gained East's acceptance by revealing the journalists' disappearance and then helping the paunchy middle-aged reporter investigate it. Soon after, when Indonesia fully invaded and occupied East Timor, the country's former independence fighters, Fretelin, sent Horta abroad to be their international spokesman (for 24 years). East stayed in the capital, Dili, and was killed, supposedly during an army round-up of civilians.

Director Robert Connolly builds tensions well in the two time frames. The quintet of TV newsmen, all in their mid-20s, are naively ambitious front-liners. A generation older, East is equally out if his depth. The youngsters sketch the Aussie flag on a wall, and East insistently cries out "I'm Australian" as if it were a mantra capable of lowering Indonesian rifles.

Connolly may have amplified geopolitical details in his commentary. I hope so, because there are only brief, though pointed, references to the secret support provided for Indonesia by both the USA and Australia. PM Whitlam, President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger are named, but the movie fails to explain why Jakarta and Washington, and Canberra, feared an independent East Timor.

All concerned, outside East Timor, were alarmed that its example might encourage other separatist movements in Indonesia. Neither does the movie explore the religious divide that had long created mutual antagonisms between the Catholic Portuguese colony and its Muslim neighbours on Timor island. Inevitably, there's no time either to note that the colony had two separate enclaves, or that neighbouring and divided Papua island was a very big political elephant in Australia's living room.

Fables, especially those about young men working in the media, have to be simple, and there is just one hint at the complexity of media competition in Australia that indirectly led to the journalists' deaths. They worked for two commercial channels; it's indicated that the national public broadcaster, ABC, pulled its news team out of Timor ahead of the expected invasion. Media nabob Packer is the only name named. The full stories of Balibo and Roger East (and Fretelin and Horta) will probably never be known. Funded by a slew of official Australian film commissions and produced with official East Timor government support, Balibo is the official fable. The dvd with a full package of background documentaries will be worth looking out for, if "History of East Timor and Balibo" etc contain information kept out of the docudrama feature.