Don Greenlees, Dili – Soon after sundown in a football field here, Domingos Ribero's gaze fixes on the screen of a makeshift outdoor cinema. Images from East Timor's violent past unfold before him, captivating a large audience who have been exposed to little of their own history.
For Ribero, like many in this field, the films being shown in the Human Rights Documentary Film Festival offer many small and large revelations.
Tonight, he watches a documentary about the early days of East Timor's painful struggle against foreign occupation.
"I think it's good for us to remember these things – many mistakes were made that we should not make again," says the 25-year-old engineering student.
He has bitter personal experiences of those mistakes. His father, a soldier under the Portuguese colonial administration and a member of the Timorese Democratic Union (UDT), was killed in the civil war of 1975.
Ribero assumes the killer was from the now-ruling Fretilin. During last year's elections for East Timor's Constituent Assembly, Ribero voted for one of the many smaller parties trying to constrain Fretilin's inevitable victory.
But he doesn't bear any grudges. Last night's declaration of independence, and the birth of the Democratic Republic of East Timor, he believes, obliges the people to put to rest old differences.
"It was a different situation back then," he says. "We are going to be independent now and we cannot try to blame others. The important thing now is whether the Government is true to the people, works for the people."
Independence is binding the East Timorese together, transcending the political disagreements that lie ahead as the country focuess on the task of nation-building.
But independence means different things to different people. Many East Timorese fear independence will be a signal for the elite to fall back into the bad old habits of ruling for themselves.
A study by the Washington-based National Democratic Institute found that although the East Timorese were in a forgiving mood, there were concerns that recently elected leaders had already stopped listening to the voters.
"The people have a well-developed sense of representative democracy, they want their representatives to come and hear their views and take their views back to the parliament," says NDI's East Timor director Jim Della Giacoma.
"The people who have the weakest sense of representative democracy are the representatives themselves, who see themselves as too busy governing to talk to the people."
Such complaints are shown in the choice of the date of the handover from UN rule to indigenous rule – May 20. This is the birthday of Fretilin's forerunner, the Timorese Social Democratic Party (ASDT). Independence Day will be celebrated on November 28, the anniversary of Fretilin's 1975 unilateral declaration of independence. This move by Fretilin to claim the symbolism of independence has irritated many East Timorese.
President Xanana Gusmao is among those to have opposed Fretilin's choice of dates. He, like many of the younger generation, preferred Independence Day to be marked on August 30, the anniversary of the 1999 referendum that paved the way for an end to Indonesian rule.
Says Gusmao's Australian wife, Kirsty Sword: "I agree with Xanana, he made it very clear publicly at the time that he didn't agree that the 20th of May was an unbiased choice of date.
"He would have preferred that it be the 30th of August, which is indisputably a day in which East Timor came out in force and showed its true colours, of which it can be hugely proud."
Ribero says irrespective of the date, he celebrates the coming of independence with a full heart. But he says such battles over the symbolism should be a reminder of how easy it is for the governed to be forgotten by the governors.
"Many of those in government now were not here in 1999 – they didn't see our experience," he says. For them, they remember East Timor as it was."