Casting light on Timor tragedy

'Balibo' director Robert Connolly in East Timor. Photo supplied.

In 2001, Robert Connolly released the prescient The Bank, a story of avarice and corruption, in which bankers thrived and battlers lost plenty.

In his latest film, Balibo, the Australian director again touches on power, but this time he is looking back, to 1975, in East Timor, where the stakes were much higher.

An estimated 183,000 East Timorese (of a population of 600,000) have died as a result of Indonesia's invasion of the former Portuguese colony.

Others have, too: the quintet of television journalists, four Australians and one New Zealander, who have become known as the "Balibo Five", and veteran foreign correspondent Roger East, who investigated the deaths of his peers only to be - according to increasingly compelling evidence - slain on a Dili wharf by an Indonesian execution squad.

Though much of his film is based on the killing of those journalists, Connolly said repeated visits to East Timor, both for research and pre-production purposes, forced him to change his approach.

"It was a real dilemma: how do you make a story about five white guys saving the Third World, set against the 200,000 East Timorese who died.

"I found that as it evolved as a screenplay, the compassionate view of what happened in East Timor changed the way we told it," Connolly explained via phone from Wellington last week.

In short, the film started and ended as quite a different beast.

David Williamson wrote the early drafts of the screenplay; about 16, reportedly ("well, that's what he said, but David and I have a different view of what a screenplay is"), until Connolly took sole charge and completed the story.

"David's drafts early on were more focused on the Balibo Five story and, as I started travelling to East Timor, I fell in love with that country but also discovered the tragedy that happened to it."

To provide a point of entry for Western audiences, Connolly opted to use East, the veteran journalist (played by Anthony LaPaglia), as a key narrative tool.

In November 1975, four weeks after five journalists - Australian Channel Nine cameraman Brian Peters (27) and reporter Malcolm Rennie (29) and Channel Seven sound recordist Tony Stewart (21), reporter Greg Shackleton (28) and New Zealand cameraman Gary Cunningham (27) - are reported missing, East heads to East Timor to investigate the fate of the journalists, who had last been seen filming news reports in the small town of Balibo.

East does not accept the official story that the men were killed in crossfire.

As his determination to uncover the truth intensifies, he undertakes a perilous trek from Dili to Balibo.

Inter-spliced with the journey are scenes of the other journalists making their way to Balibo four weeks earlier, determined to film the imminent Indonesian invasion.

On the morning of October 16 all five men are executed by Indonesian troops, despite having identified themselves as journalists.

Their bodies are then burnt.