Shooting Balibo

Thirty years after he was there with the Balibo Five, Tony Maniaty returns to East Timor to lay his ghosts to rest, in a beautifully written memoir. Balibo, directed by Robert Connolly, screens in Australian cinemas from 13 August 2009 and stars Anthony LaPaglia as Australian journalist Roger East, who ventures to East Timor in 1975 at the urging of Jose Ramos-Horta (Oscar Isaac) to investigate the deaths of the Balibo Five - and to report on the impending Indonesian invasion of the tiny Portuguese colony. The first feature film shot on location in Timor-Leste, Balibo also features Damon Gameau, Gyton Grantley, Nathan Phillips, Mark Winter and Tom Wright as the Balibo Five. For more details, visit http://www.melbournefilmfestival.com.au/ Balibo screens in Australian cinemas from 13 August 2009. When foreign correspondent Tony Maniaty goes back to Timor for the first time since he fled for his life thirty years before, he discovers a land of ghosts - some he left behind, and some he's brought with him. He's there to watch five young actors play out the last days of five friends of his - men who were murdered by the Indonesian army in one of the most infamous incidents (and cover-ups) in Australian foreign affairs. He's also there to talk to some friends who survived - Gusmao, Ramos-Horta - people he knew as guerillas and who now run the country. When he arrives, past and present, fiction and fact begin to overlap: at the Hotel Turismo he's assigned room eleven - the room he had in 1975. And, he later discovers, the room the actor playing his young self had been staying in. Old contacts appear out of the jungle, and disappear into rooms of state. But the most harrowing overlap is when he watches five young men being taken into a shack on the outskirts of Balibo, towards death.