Activating the future: political documentaries and media activism.

In January 2006, the Jakarta Film Festival in Indonesia banned the screening of a documentary film about the recent political events in East Timor. This attempt at deactivation ironically, and naturally, fueled the film's potential reach. Passabe (2005), the debut film of two Singapore-based filmmakers, Lynn Lee and James Leong, documents the attempts (backed by the United Nations [UN]) to establish East Timor's Commission for Reception in remote villages. These villages were torn apart by violence inflicted by Indonesian militia groups after the 1999 referendum for independence following two decades of Indonesian rule. Named after the village from which came a group that massacred seventy-four people from neighboring pro-independence villages, the film follows a Passabe resident, Alexio Elu, who confessed to taking part in a massacre at a killing field called Teun Lasi near his village. Through Elu's acts of attrition, the film interweaves the political, social, and spiritual dimensions of the attempts to restore peace.

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Passabe is one of the many contemporary films that document and dramatize postconflict situations. Like Passabe, Tom Hooper's Red Dust (2004), set in South Africa, deals with the subject matter of Truth and Reconciliation. While Hotel Rwanda (2004, by Terry George) gives the Rwanda genocide the Hollywood treatment and the consolation of a final and conclusive redemption, Shooting Dogs (2005, by Michael Caton-Jones) sustains a bleaker perspective that is more accusatory of the failure of western governments to intervene in the genocide. The documentary Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Rome Dallaire (2004, by Peter Raymont) follows Romeo Dallaire (the UN general who was literally abandoned by the world community in the midst of the killings) to Rwanda ten years after the genocide; it is a damning indictment of the international community's overt racism and failure to act. A decade earlier, the conflict that occurred in the former Yugoslavia gave rise to the popularly received Welcome to Sarajevo (1997, by Michael Winterbottom) and the lesser-known Two Hours from London (1995, by Jill Craigie), a documentary on the complexity of the war in which is expressed outrage at the international community's ineffective attempts at intervention. These films share a particular grimness in that they relate to actual horrific events and serve as testimonies of a collective failure to salvage claims to humanity and civilization. Yet, despite the bleak subject matter, films (whether documentary or dramatized) that possess a referential relationship to recent political events have enjoyed a resurgence of public interest since the early 1990s, as Linda Williams notes. (1) Observing an interest for images that reference the real, Williams discerns a transformation in the status of documentary truth to its postmodern equivalent. She writes about the new documentaries' profound knowledge of the contingency of truth and notes that "the documentarian's role in constructing and staging these competing narratives thus become paramount. In place of the self-obscuring voyeur of verite realism, we encounter, in these and other films, a new presence in the persona of the documentarian." (2)

While Williams ponders the effect of contingent truths on the cinema verite tradition, Jane M. Gaines muses about the "strange association of apolitical films with social change and radical politics" and wonders, "what is the significance, if any, of the reception of political documentaries in the absence of a struggle?" (3) Gaines considers the work of political documentaries as that of enabling mimesis: "Political mimesis begins with the body. Actualized, it is about a relationship between bodies in two locations--on the screen and in the audience--and it is the starting point for the consideration of what the one body makes the other do." (4) It is worthwhile to ask what is meant when we describe a film as being political, and in the present context, how we could construe the political work of films such as Passabe if the film deals only retrospectively with the events it represents; that is, if we accept Gaines's idea of political mimesis. Put another way, would such a definition of political mimesis apply when it becomes possible for films about Robert Mugabe's regime in Zimbabwe to be made, probably after all the terror is done and the dust has settled?

Translated into a broader context. Gaines's definition of political mimesis is applicable to understanding media activism: instead of making us zombiefied consumers of mass culture, how do films and the media instill political consciousness and action? The tens of millions of bloggers, tens of thousands of hackers, independent news, Net art, and activist Web sites are testament to thriving political activism, specifically, but not exclusively, on the Internet. Such a notion of media activism involves acting in the present, with the view of affecting political change, functioning in the mimetic fashion that Gaines advocates; but this is different from the work of documentary films such as Passabe. In fact, Gaines's question about the significance of viewing political documentaries in the absence of a struggle and Williams's exploration of the contingency of documentary truth would be instructive in nurturing a more complex understanding of the different political work achievable by media activism and the political documentary. (5)

The success story of East Timor's relatively smooth transition to sovereignty contrasts sharply with the political oppression the country quietly suffered under Indonesian rule as a pawn in Cold War exigencies where the situation went largely unreported by the media. It was not until the visits of Pope John Paul II in 1989 and John Cameron Monjo, a United States ambassador, in 1990 that there was a foreign media presence. This was the beginning of the call for Timorese independence. The fact that it takes media exposure and scrutiny for political change to occur is nothing new, but the extent to which various forms of media activism worked toward East Timor's eventual independence is testament to the context in which Gaines's notion of political mimesis would apply. For instance, various groups that lobbied for Timorese independence around the world were kept informed by an illegal radio station run by activists in Darwin. Australia. (6) The example of Tom Hyland, the Irish bus driver who felt compelled to work for Timorese independence after watching a television program depicting gratuitous Indonesian violence against the Timorese people--actions which caught the national imagination and led to extensive campaigning for Timorese independence in Ireland--is legendary of the mimetic behavior the media is able to incite.

These documented accounts of media activism that led to Timorese independence differ from the story that Passabe attempts to tell. While the cause for Timorese independence is won and history celebrates a milestone, the work of reconstruction, reconciliation, and nation-building has only just begun. Writing about the contemporary documentary's departure from the verite tradition that aims to capture reality as it unfolds, Williams is seeking recourse to the past as "an attempt to overturn this commitment to realistically record life as it is' in favor of a deeper investigation of how it became as it is." (7) While Passabe revisits the recent past to delve into "how it became as it is" in these remote East Timorese villages, the film does not so much provide conclusions as it presents a sense of the fragile peace, post-independence, that foreign agencies arc helping to hold together. In as much as the villages are suspicious of one another, there is a greater fear of the Indonesian threat from across the border. "How it became as it is" in East Timor appears to have no simple answer, and what it will become remains to be seen.

Passabe, by documenting the direct efforts a fraught political situation has on the lives of people who live in precarious poverty, serves as a reminder of difficult ethical issues in times of conflict and genocide, and confirms the necessity of retaining the political imperative in both media activism and documentary filmmaking. Zygmunt Bauman has written about victims' complicity with perpetrators in relation to the Holocaust, and his remarks are applicable to the story that Passabe documents. (8) Despite the suspicions and fears that surround the communities, those interviewed in the film ultimately blame the Indonesian government, and it is a mitigating factor that Elu uses in his extraordinary confession: that he exercised no free will when he committed murder, that it was a choice between killing or being killed.

The difficulty, if not impossibility of ascertaining guilt reveals the contingency of truth. This is acknowledged by both Passabe and the Truth and Reconciliation hearings that the film documents. The film is an attempt at reconciliation--choosing to explore and release (instead of surpress) the traumas lodged in the collective imagination through its act of bearing witness to the political, social, and spiritual dimensions of Passabe and the region's progress in recovering from a massacre.