Katrina Strickland – There is a scene in the ABC's new mini-series, Answered By Fire, in which a journalist tells a couple of United Nations police that the Australian government received intelligence ahead of East Timor's 1999 independence referendum about the likelihood of post-ballot violence.

It is one of those issues that you expect to be developed further as the mini-series progresses. Did the government really know? Who, when and to what extent? What effect did it have on the main protagonists? Strangely, the matter is not touched upon beyond this scene.

It is indicative of the difficulties facing filmmakers who use recent history as the basis for a fictional tale, that the makers of this TV show, the first drama to be filmed about East Timor's bloody road to independence, chose to include this reference without expanding on it.

Plenty has been written about the issue in the press, but to veer too much into politics, or to state as fact that which might still be contested, is to risk becoming a political football. If you're playing with distant history, the arguments over how accurately you have portrayed a situation will be mostly waged by historians. With six-year-old history, anyone who lived through it will have an opinion.

It's a problem that is particularly pertinent to Jessica Hobbs, who in directing Answered by Fire was dealing with a cast of 40-plus Timorese people who had not acted before and all of whom had either lived through the referendum, or had (or lost) family who did.

The two-part mini-series, which screens on the ABC next Sunday night and again the following weekend, tells the story of the 1999 referendum through the personal journeys of an Australian (David Wenham) and Canadian (Isabelle Blais), who work for the UN as civilian police, and their Timorese translator (Alex Tilman).

Hobbs says writers Barbara Samuels and Katherine Thomson did extensive research to ensure their fictional account was based squarely on fact, but that, primarily, they had written a personal tale.

"We didn't want to hijack the Timorese story with Australian politics, because that's another story," says Hobbs. "It can start to feel like a polemic if you focus too much on what the Australian government did and didn't do, and that's not the point. For me it was always about setting a personal journey in a political landscape, so let's get the personal journey right.

The cornerstones of that are the political history and you don't bugger around with them, but it is a story about how what happened affected individuals."

Hobbs says directing a cast with such personal connections to the story was one of the most difficult and rewarding jobs of her career.

By way of example she mentions Jose de Costa, a teacher in real life who plays a murdering militia leader in Answered by Fire. Costa's own father was a member of the East Timorese resistance, and Costa was himself locked up and tortured by the Indonesian police. A scene in which Costa has to shoot someone at point blank range took all day to film. "He couldn't hold the gun up to him, his hand was shaking so much, he was physically ill," says Hobbs.

She had her own doubts about the ethics of dredging up bad memories for the sake of a fictional TV series. "I was really wondering whether it was the right thing to do, whether it was appropriate or worth it, whether it would bring out things that could be damaging [to the cast members] in the long term," she says.

In the case of Answered by Fire there was an added incentive to focus on the personal and stay away from Australian politics; the two-part mini-series is co-funded by the ABC and its Canadian equivalent, with Australia accounting for 70 per cent of the $8 million budget and Canada providing the balance.

When the show screens in Australia there might be some interest in the Australian political angle; when it screens in Canada, most likely some time after October, there will be zero interest. Hobbs and the team who made the film were relieved to receive a positive response during screenings in Darwin and Melbourne earlier this month from audiences made up of people who worked or lived in East Timor at the time of the referendum.

A number of policemen attended the screening, along with the cast, members of the expatriate Timorese community and relatives of the Australian journalists who were murdered in Balibo in 1975.