Asakiyume mita

I enjoyed the documentary very much! There was a lot of unusual footage, like of Xanana Gusmão, revolutionary leader (and current prime minister) in prison, or of Kirsty Sword Gusmão's first visit to East Timor, back in the very early 1990s. The things I was most surprised to learn were tangential to the main story: Cipinang Prison in Indonesia was nothing like what I would have imagined, and the degree of corruptibility of the guards was amazing. Some half-dozen of them were essentially in the pay of the Timorese resistance and Xanana ended up with a cell phone and computer in prison. At one point Ramos-Horta (Nobel Peace Prize winner and East Timor's first president) remarked that at times Xanana seemed more up-to-date technologically than Ramos-Horta himself:

"What's he talking about? Does he know more Internet than me? He's in prison, and he knows more Internet than me!

Also, this prison: the prisoners cooked their own meals (Xanana filmed himself making "prison mashed potatoes") and grew their own vegetables--and apparently growing bonsai trees was part of the government's program of their rehabilitation. Consequently, Xanana was always sending Kirsty bonsai trees. She ended up with about twenty of them, it looked like.

The details of the development of their personal relationship were charming. At one point Kirsty sent him a photo of her, back to the camera so that it couldn't reveal who she was to anyone who might see/confiscate it. He then painted that photo and sent her the painting. She took a photo of herself in the same position (same hair style), looking at the painting. He then painted that. So they ended up with this recursive set of images:



He sent her fish, too, and took video of himself tending fish in his own aquarium:



Then there's footage of them when he finally got released. At one point he was opening a pack of Marlboros, and I was struck again by how much he reminded me of my Japanese boyfriend (whose favorite brand was Marlboro). They could have been brothers--that's what I thought, looking at this image:



And the film does deal with the historical events around East Timor's independence. The very first shots, from when Kirsty visits when it's still under Indonesian rule, show lots of anxious faces, every time the camera pans the local population:



And there's the live footage from the horrible Santa Cruz massacre in 1991, which I've seen stills from. There happened to be an Australian team there, filming the demonstration, and when the journalist realized what was happening, he buried his camera in a grave (the demonstrators retreated to the graveyard associated with the church and then were mown down by the police--and many of those who were taken alive were lated killed in police custody). He later retrieved it, and it was that footage getting out that led to international pressure that eventually led to the referendum that resulted in East Timor's independence. And, the film covered the vote in that referendum. I've seen this mentioned in the past, but one thing that was notable about the people coming to vote was that they came with their household goods, because they knew that after the election, there would be violence, and they were likely to be refugees.

But I think the strength of the documentary isn't its historical focus; it's more about these two people coming together in this tumultuous circumstance.