Balibo Five film could change history

When Damon Gameau was preparing to play Greg Shackleton, one of the five Australian journalists massacred by Indonesian troops in East Timor in 1975, he sought the counsel and blessing of the murdered man's widow Shirley.

Shackleton has been the most vocal of the family members keeping alive the memory of the so-called Balibo Five, demanding their killers are brought before a court and their crime acknowledged by the Australian government.

Thus Gameau was expecting an idealised portrait of Shackleton, whose to-camera reports from East Timor are now regarded as among the finest frontline journalism in our history. What she said shocked Gameau.

"Shirley told me that Greg was an absolute prick," laughs Gameau during a flying visit to Perth with Balibo co-writer and director Robert Connolly.

"She said he rubbed people up the wrong way, he was very ambitious, he was very difficult to work with, he used to give everyone the shits. It was fantastic.

"Shirley gave me licence to play Greg with all of his complexities and contradictions. Shackleton was vain - he had a suntan lamp in his office and had plastic surgery on his nose - but he had great empathy for the suffering of the East Timorese people."

This warts-and-all depiction of Greg Shackleton is a measure of the commitment Connolly and his team had to getting things right.

Drawing on Jill Jolliffe's definitive account of the massacre, Cover-Up, and the findings of the 2007 NSW coronial inquest, Connolly recreates so accurately the brutal and illegal invasion of the tiny island nation by Indonesian forces that it might well have been retrieved from the cameras of the murdered newsmen.

Connolly and co-writer David Williamson frame this story with the journey of another journalist, veteran Australian war correspondent Roger East (played by Anthony LaPaglia), who made his way to Balibo with the guidance of the young Jose Ramos Horta (Oscar Isaac) to find out what happened to his colleagues.

The event became a cause celebre for the Australian Left during the late 1970s, which was outraged by the refusal of successive Australian governments - beginning with a shockingly compliant Gough Whitlam - to demand justice, for fear of alienating our powerful northern neighbour.

It's a big political story but Connolly said he deliberately chose to keep his film from the corridors of power and stay with the tragedy itself - the deaths not just of the Australians but the slaughter of 183,000 East Timorese from a population of only 600,000.

"What I wanted to tell is the truth of what happened," says Connolly, whose career is divided between producing (The Boys, Romulus, My Father) and directing (The Bank, Three Dollars).

"In the earliest stages of the project we considered including the political context, the appeasement of President Suharto by the Americans and the Australians because of oil.

"But we realised that this shocking event in our recent history had been largely forgotten, especially by those born after 1975. So we made the decision to tell their story, to follow their journey to Timor and record their appalling end.

"The killing of the Balibo Five has been denied for 34 years. The coroner has found they were murdered but it is still not the official government line in Australia. So I felt an obligation to put those events on film."

While accuracy was uppermost in Connolly's mind, he didn't set out to give a history lesson. Rather, he sees Balibo as an edge-of-the-seat thriller, stirring mainstream entertainment in which an important piece of history is told in a way that is as exciting as it is enlightening.

"I like to see my film as part of a tradition that includes Salvador, The Killing Fields and The Last King of Scotland," explains Connolly.

He also likes to see Balibo linked to the big historical political movies made during the 1970s and early 80s (the golden age of Australian cinema) such as Newsfront, The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, Gallipoli and The Year of Living Dangerously.

"After the 1970s, the role of historical and political scrutiny shifted from cinema to television with mini-series such as Vietnam and The Dismissal. Now we've stopped making those kind of programs I think cinema is once again taking up that role."

Connolly was also inspired by the recent Peter Morgan-scripted drama The Queen, in which a strand of fiction was threaded through the largely factual tableau, most notably the conversations between Queen Elizabeth and Tony Blair.

In the same spirit, Connolly and David Williamson used fiction to flesh out the relationship between Roger East, who was later to die when the Indonesians reached Dili, and Jose Ramos Horta, the Fretilin freedom fighter who later became the second president of the newly independent nation.

While Connolly is hoping Balibo is a sizeable box-office hit, what he would really like for the film to achieve is for the men who killed the five journalists to be tried and for the Australian government finally to acknowledge they were murdered (the official line is that they died in crossfire).

One such imagined scene is when Horta comes to the Turismo hotel in Dili to persuade LaPaglia's Roger East to leave East Timor, a deeply moving moment when the Australian declares his commitment to tell the world what was happening in the embattled former Portuguese colony.

"The first time I met Jose I described the scene I'd written. He was amazed at what I'd hypothesised. 'I went to the Turismo and I spoke with Roger. That's how it happened', he told me."

While Connolly is happy to talk about using fiction to capture the truth of a situation and entertainment to bring serious issues to a broad audience, his 33-year-old star struggles to regard Balibo as just a movie. For Gameau it was a life- changing experience.

"It doesn't feel like we made a film," explains Gameau, who is part of a committee planning an event in Federation Square to mark the 10th anniversary of East Timor's independence. "It feels like we were involved in something larger."

Connolly also hopes Balibo's impact will extend beyond the box office and connect with those films which have changed history.

"If the film puts pressure on governments to have the murderers of the Balibo Five charged, then I think we will have done something special."

Balibo opens today.