Balibo – Movie Review
I remember when I first heard about the Balibo 5, it was on a news report a few years ago and it questioned the role of our then government headed up by Gough Whitlam. The tragedy occurred was before I was born, but the conflict of East Timor becoming it’s own nation in 1999 was something that I saw from afar via news reports and friends serving in the army at the time.
Balibo is set in 1975, East Timor has become it’s own nation after 400 years of Portuguese rule. A new and unstable nation just above Australia was good news for the Australian Media outlets that desperately needed something other than Vietnam to talk about. On the ground though, it became very obvious that Indonesia would soon invade the new nation. 5 journalists went to the front-line to film and report on the invasion. They where murdered by the Indonesian army to keep the story from getting out.
The story follows the five journos but also another journalist called Roger East who went into East Timor 4 weeks later with Jose Ramos-Horta (now current president of East Timor) to see East Timor country and then become editor and chief of the nation’s free press beureau.
Roger is an older man, who has seen a fair bit and is a little tired of going into dangerous places for a story. Jose tells him about the missing journos, his interest in what happened to them pulls him into East Timor.
While Jose wants Roger to run the free press for the new liberated East Timor, he also knows that he needs to give Roger what he wants, so they start a trek to Balibo. As they get closer, Roger starts doubting his own convictions in the story and the violence on the ground escalates.
We see the brutal killings of the 5 journalists, though evidently less graphically than what actually happened. Once Roger has confirmed that they are actually dead, he returns to Dili but instead of leaving like every other right-mind person does, he stays and pays the ultimate price in doing so.
The film is an emotional piece. We get a sense of the 5 younger men trying to do their jobs and also have fun at the same time. Anthony Lapagia does a great job as Roger East and we feel with him as the bullets fly. The one criticism I would lay at the film is that at times the story feels a bit too narrow. I wanted to know a little bit more about East Timor and why these acts happened. I wanted to feel not just for the journalists but also the people of East Timor. The story is more Australian than East Timorese, and that isn’t bad, but learning about these events made me want to understand the motivations of the other characters in the film. This could also be called a win in the film makers eyes.
Balibo is a worthy viewing experience with a story that shouldn’t have taken 30 years for the Australian public to know about.
Trailer
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