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Of love and war

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Brisbane Times - January 1, 2012

East Timor's first feature film revisits the tiny nation's tortured struggle for independence, writes Natalie Craig.

The people of Kasai are standing behind the camera, transfixed. Indonesian soldiers left their tiny village, just west of Dili in East Timor, more than a decade ago. Now their memories of that bloody period are being acted out before them.

In the scene being filmed, two Indonesian soldiers are sitting in the dust and smoking. Nearby, three girls are playing in a go-kart. One of the soldiers aims his rifle at the girls and makes comical "pow" noises. An officer approaches and orders the soldier to shoot. "You don't play with a weapon; use it for what it was made," he says.

Just as the soldier is about to fire, a woman rushes in and challenges the soldier to shoot her instead. He lowers his gun.

The scene takes about an hour to get right, but the group of about 50 spectators, including young children, are mute and stock-still for its duration. Later, village chief Viriato Martens says, through a interpreter: "It is true – anything the Indonesians wanted to do, they did it ... We know it is make-believe, but some of the women are scared."

A Guerra da Beatriz is the first movie authored by East Timorese artists, an emotional undertaking in a country still haunted by the memories of the Indonesian occupation. East Timor hit the big screen in the 2009 movie Balibo, about the execution of five Australian journalists in 1975, but that was essentially an Australian production. By contrast, this film is conceived, performed and directed by young Timorese, with support from volunteer Melbourne filmmakers.

Local theatre performer Irim Tolentino has written the script in the Timorese language, Tetum, and fellow stage actress Bety Reis is the director. Both are being mentored by Melbourne director Luigi Acquisto and his wife, film producer Stella Zammataro.

"Film is a way of remembering the past, but it is also a way forward," says Reis, 29, whose family was part of the clandestine independence movement. "I want this new life. I want to be a filmmaker. Foreigners can tell our story, but when we tell it, it feels real."

Invited to watch the first week of filming, I am overwhelmed by examples of art imitating life.

Women extras weep unprompted during a scene in which they are forced from their homes by Indonesian soldiers, just as they were 25 years ago. A man who lived under a bridge for the final few years of the occupation, and who avoided persecution by pretending to be permanently intoxicated, is cast as the town drunk. And former guerillas in East Timor's Falintil resistance army have been cast, more or less, as themselves.

Commander Fanu Latean, a muscular 54-year-old with smiling eyes and modern, square-framed glasses, is playing a Falintil hero. He jokes that he has been researching the role for more than a decade.

"I was a guerilla in the mountains for 11 years, until the Indonesians captured me ... They shot me in the stomach and shot off my finger," he says through an interpreter, showing me his missing digit. "They forced us to join their army, but I lied and said I couldn't shoot without my finger. So they gave me a loudspeaker and it was my job to try and get the villagers to surrender ... I fed information to my men in the mountains."

Like many of the performers, he drifts between pride in being part of East Timor's first movie, and anguish over the memories it resurrects. "I saw many people killed; many unspeakable things. But I am very happy to do the part, otherwise who else will take it?"

A Guerra da Beatriz, or "Beatrice's War", is a love story spanning the Indonesian occupation, from 1975 to 1999. (Independence was formalised in 2002.) Beatriz is a young woman whose husband, Tomas, goes missing following the Kraras massacre of 1983, a real event in which all 150 males of that village, including the infants, were rounded up and shot by Indonesian soldiers.

In the film, Beatriz continues to believe that Tomas is alive until one day, after the Indonesian withdrawal, a man claiming to be him returns to the village. Beatriz falls deeply in love with this man, who is more charismatic and confident than the old Tomas, but she is troubled by her suspicion that he is an impostor and a traitor who fought in a notorious Indonesian militia.

Jose da Costa, who plays Tomas, explains the plot reflects the country's struggle to strike a balance between forgiveness and justice. "My character is very complex; a lot of men who fought in the [Indonesian] militias are now coming back to Timor and they're trying to pretend that they are heroes, but it is a small country and it is hard to hide your past," says the ruggedly handsome 35-year-old, who also had a small part in Balibo. "I do have sympathy for my character, because sometimes people are desperate to survive, and they don't think about the future."

More than 100,000 people were killed during Indonesia's occupation of East Timor, and the presidents of both countries have said they want to close the question of who was responsible by blaming institutions, not individuals. (Among those who have escaped conviction is Prabowo Subianto, a retired Indonesian general allegedly behind atrocities, including the Kraras massacre. He intends to run for president in Indonesia in 2014.)

Da Costa says while the country is now on reasonable terms with Indonesia, not all Timorese are ready to forgive and forget. "A Guerra da Beatriz shows, I can accept you, I can accept that this has happened, but there has to be some justice."

Like others on the film, he has suffered personally from the occupation. His father was executed by Indonesian soldiers in 1985 for working with the Falintil. In 1991, he was at the pro-independence demonstration at Dili's Santa Cruz cemetery when about 250 people were killed by Indonesian police. He was arrested and tortured for a week for information about the movement.

In 1995, he escaped on a fishing boat to Australia and after gaining refugee status settled in Melbourne. He completed the VCE and gained a bachelor of education at the Australian Catholic University in Ballarat. He returned to Dili in 2004 and married his childhood sweetheart, a woman he hadn't seen since he was 10.

Da Costa says he still blames the Australian government for its failure to intervene after the Indonesian invasion, but is devoted to the Australian people. "The Australian people have supported the independence movement, and still support us today ... East Timor has a lot of stories, and Australia is helping us to start telling them."

A Guerra da Beatriz is the product of a long collaboration between East Timor and Australia. Last year, Da Costa teamed with Reis to establish Dili Film Works. Together with Acquisto and Zammataro, who live part-time in Dili with their adopted Timorese daughter, they ran filmmaking workshops for a dozen young students. Balibo producer John Maynard taught some of the masterclasses.

The students made three short documentaries and one short comedy. The films were screened, together with a dubbed version of Balibo, by Cinema Loro Sa'e, an initiative of the owners of Sun Theatre in Yarraville, which shows films in old Dili theatres and in remote towns on portable outdoor screens. The films were a tremendous success, and probably the first anyone had seen made in Tetum. The crowd favourite was the 11-minute comedy Vagabond, about a man who runs a successful dog-meat restaurant, but who is nonetheless unlucky in love.

Buoyed by this success, Dili Film Works is making the full-length movie, with assistance on the finer points of camera, sound, lighting and production from Acquisto and Zammataro's company, Fairtrade Films, and with Maynard as executive producer.

The movie incorporates a cast of 12, several remote locations, action scenes and hundreds of extras, including chickens, dogs, children and babies. In this respect, it is on the scale of Balibo, but with a much lower budget. (Acquisto will only say that it is "about a 50th" of Balibo's).

The filmmakers have had to be resourceful. The soldiers are real; borrowed from the Timor Leste Defence Force and dressed in Indonesian army uniforms bought on the internet. Rather than using sound stages, the locations are real villages, used with the permission of communities who are also being paid good local wages as extras. Equipment is on loan from Fairtrade Films. Acquisto and Zammataro are sharing their expertise with their Timorese counterparts, as are a Melbourne camera and editing crew: Valeriu Campan, Rocco Fasano, Glen Forster and Nick Calpakdjian.

Australian logistics company Toll has donated daily catering, vehicles and portaloos, and flights for the Melbourne crew. Rentlo has provided more cars, and Airnorth more flights. Cash for props and wages for local cast and crew has come mainly from a fund-raising website and individual Australian donors. The East Timorese government has made a small contribution.

About two-thirds of the film has been shot, but more money is needed. Filming wrapped up in late November, and while the intention is to resume in March in the remote village of Kraras, it will be difficult if not impossible without further financial support.

Kirsty Gusmao, the Victorian wife of Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao, said on a visit to the set that film was "a tremendous creative outlet" but it would be difficult to argue for more immediate funding. "I think a film industry will be a wonderful way of keeping East Timor's history, the challenges of the present and the future in the public eye internationally," she said.

"I'm sure in time there will be adequate support, but it can be difficult to see cultural endeavours as a priority when you've still got schools that don't have roofs on them, and communities that are not reached by medical services."

Another priority are the elections in May, in which East Timor will vote to decide the government and presidency. Factional fighting in the lead-up to the last elections in 2007 triggered a United Nations peacekeeping intervention, but the UN has deemed the country stable enough for it to withdraw at the end of the year.

Still, corruption and bureaucratic inefficiency remain major problems. East Timor ranks 164 out of 183 on the World Bank's list of the best countries to do business, and even the simplest task, such as registering a business name, takes months. But Dili Film Works is patient. They spent most of last year organising the shoot, and have also enlisted the help of two of Dili's best-connected people, Lurdes Pires and Gaspar Sarmento, who also work as "fixers" for foreign journalists.

It was Pires, a prominent independence campaigner, who secured the involvement of the army. Her old school friend, Brigadier-General Filomeno Paixao, is second-in-command of the Timor Leste Defence Force.

On the first morning of filming, however, the soldiers arrive two hours late. They explain they were waiting for their guns (unloaded vintage G3s and SKSs), the original weapons of the Falintil guerillas, inherited from the Portuguese colonial army. (The Portuguese withdrawal in 1974, after 200 years of colonial rule, was one of the triggers for the Indonesian invasion.) The Falintil veteran in charge of minding the hidden stock of vintage weapons went missing that morning, hence their delay.

The incident prompts the Melbourne camera crew to joke that the making of A Guerra da Beatriz could turn out to be the poor man's version of Apocalypse Now, which was almost derailed by illness, bad weather and the Philippine army's repeated withdrawal of its helicopters from filming in order to fight actual battles.

Somewhat ominously, the first day of filming of A Guerra da Beatriz is rained out. Crying babies, cast illness and communication problems are also a drag over the next few days. An actress is almost taken out by a falling coconut, and the man playing the town drunk is impossible to find.

Electricity is another problem. It's only reliable between midnight and dawn in Dili (unless you're on the "presidential grid"), so the constant maintenance of diesel generators is necessary to keep power flowing to editing equipment and computers.

The crew and most of the cast work 12 hours a day for four days straight, in temperatures well over 30 degrees. If this were a normal Australian film crew, says Acquisto, "they would be a lot shittier".

But the creative and cathartic outlet of filmmaking seems enough to buoy their spirits. There are also some astounding performances. In one scene, the women of Kraras, widowed after the massacre, are taken away in an open army cargo truck. Some of the extras are professional mourners, or "wailing women", who are paid to weep at funerals. The sound is haunting, but unlike normal crying.

Then Pires whispers something to one of the women at the front of the truck. In the next take, the woman calls out "to save the spirits of our lost children", and the crying changes; now they are weeping for real. Soon everyone, including myself and the Australian crew, is crying. Pires says it's likely many of the women have lost babies – East Timor has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world.

In another scene, Sarmento, who plays an Indonesian colonel, executes Celestino, played by the old Falintil commander Fanu Latean. Off-camera, Sarmento, who studied Indonesian and later worked in the clandestine movement, is a jolly man with a permanent cheeky grin. But once the camera rolls, his face hardens.

On a cliff overlooking the beach, Sarmento, as the colonel, orders Latean's Celestino character to dig his own grave, but he refuses. The men lock eyes. Sarmento barks "shoot" and soldiers open fire. It's one of the best takes of the week. This, clearly, will be a powerful, professional film.

"That was incredible!" gushes Acquisto. "Actors have to project; that was just him."

The commander, too, is proud of his work. "I hope my grandchildren will see that I am more than just a fighter," he says.

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