Balibo

Last night I had the experience of watching Balibo… I say experience because it was… It was a gritty, no holds barred account of the story of the Balibo Five. I new OF the story, but never knew THE story and how it came to be, along with the Roger East connection… Afterwards we were treated to a Q&A with cinematographer Tristan Milani ACS, who was the DOP on the film… Tristan explained how they managed to make it on a budget of $4 million and a crew of 19 in East Timor… This was the first feature ever to be shot in Timor…


It was very realistic… Even using some of the original lenses of the era to shoot some of the sequences… To get the realism of the reporters’ pieces to camera, they loaded what they had from archive footage onto an iPod and then viewed that on location prior to shooting it… The cameras in the film were the ones used by the crews, but the only disappointment was the microphones they were using as props were RE50’s with XLR connectors which weren’t available back then... the RE50’s predecessor the RE12 was the go with film camera’s in the 1970’s…


Apparently the Indonesian media are labelling it a story of fantasy and that it never happened and it will never be shown in Indonesia; while in Timor, thousands of locals flocked to see it in a travelling roadshow around the country…