In 2001, Robert Connolly released the prescient The Bank, a story of avarice and corruption, in which bankers thrived and battlers lost plenty.
In his latest film, Balibo, the Australian director again touches on power, but this time he is looking back, to 1975, in East Timor, where the stakes were much higher.
An estimated 183,000 East Timorese (of a population of 600,000) have died as a result of Indonesia's invasion of the former Portuguese colony.
Others have, too: the quintet of television journalists, four Australians and one New Zealander, who have become known as the "Balibo Five", and veteran foreign correspondent Roger East, who investigated the deaths of his peers only to be - according to increasingly compelling evidence - slain on a Dili wharf by an Indonesian execution squad.
Though much of his film is based on the killing of those journalists, Connolly said repeated visits to East Timor, both for research and pre-production purposes, forced him to change his approach.
"It was a real dilemma: how do you make a story about five white guys saving the Third World, set against the 200,000 East Timorese who died.
"I found that as it evolved as a screenplay, the compassionate view of what happened in East Timor changed the way we told it," Connolly explained via phone from Wellington last week.
In short, the film started and ended as quite a different beast.
David Williamson wrote the early drafts of the screenplay; about 16, reportedly ("well, that's what he said, but David and I have a different view of what a screenplay is"), until Connolly took sole charge and completed the story.
"David's drafts early on were more focused on the Balibo Five story and, as I started travelling to East Timor, I fell in love with that country but also discovered the tragedy that happened to it."
To provide a point of entry for Western audiences, Connolly opted to use East, the veteran journalist (played by Anthony LaPaglia), as a key narrative tool.
In November 1975, four weeks after five journalists - Australian Channel Nine cameraman Brian Peters (27) and reporter Malcolm Rennie (29) and Channel Seven sound recordist Tony Stewart (21), reporter Greg Shackleton (28) and New Zealand cameraman Gary Cunningham (27) - are reported missing, East heads to East Timor to investigate the fate of the journalists, who had last been seen filming news reports in the small town of Balibo.
East does not accept the official story that the men were killed in crossfire.
As his determination to uncover the truth intensifies, he undertakes a perilous trek from Dili to Balibo.
Inter-spliced with the journey are scenes of the other journalists making their way to Balibo four weeks earlier, determined to film the imminent Indonesian invasion.
On the morning of October 16 all five men are executed by Indonesian troops, despite having identified themselves as journalists.
Their bodies are then burnt.
After uncovering the truth, East returns to Dili to discover Jose Ramos-Horta has been chosen by his colleagues in the East Timorese Government to represent the country in exile at the United Nations.
Ramos-Horta is unable to convince East to join him on a flight to safety in advance of the impending invasion, leaving East the only remaining foreign correspondent in East Timor.
Indonesian paratroopers and commandos attack Dili and capture East, who is executed on the Dili wharf by Indonesian soldiers together with hundreds of East Timorese.
In a combination of luck and good research, Connolly unearthed an image of a 25-year-old Ramos-Horta, the current elected President of the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste, on a wharf in Darwin in 1975.
Connolly then discovered Ramos-Horta had contacted East and invited him to go to East Timor.
"East was anxious about going but wanted to find out what had happened to the Balibo Five ... you couldn't have written that.
"If I'd made that up, it would have appeared too obvious a narrative device," the director explained.
"Again, it is the evolution of the story from just the Balibo Five.
"You discover there was this sixth journalist and he's an interesting counter to the Balibo Five.
"He was in his early 50s, was more experienced.
"People say the Balibo Five shouldn't have been there; that they were naïve.
"Well, I think Roger East's story stands in the face of that.
"He was really experienced; he went there and they killed him, too."
In researching Balibo, Connolly drew on Jill Jolliffe's 2001 book Cover Up, as well as her interviews with East Timorese tortured under Indonesian rule.
He also accessed some of the testimony of more than 8000 East Timorese who have come forward to tell their stories to the Timor-Leste Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation.
Closer to home, the 2007 Glebe (NSW) coronial inquest on Brian Peters (an investigation that, by extension, also detailed the deaths of the other journalists) provided strong evidence to refute the long-held claim by the Australian Government (and others, including New Zealand) that the journalists were killed in crossfire between advancing Indonesian forces and East Timor's Fretilin defenders.
As a result of NSW deputy coroner Dorelle Pinch's inquiry, the Australian Federal Police last year began investigating war crime allegations and will make a recommendation later this year as to whether charges be laid under the Geneva Convention.
"The coronial findings were so thorough; they laid the foundations for the war crimes charges.
"I was able to use her wonderful work in finding out how the Balibo Five were murdered, to show that in the film," Connolly said.
"We were quite forensic in depicting it."
Certainly, the footage of the deaths of the Balibo Five is graphic and moving, as is that of East's slaying.
Yet some would have preferred Connolly to take a wider view, to explain better the political machinations and foreign policy pragmatism that have prompted such a lengthy denial and suppression of the facts.
In a review of the film on his website, veteran journalist John Pilger wrote: "Claiming to be a `true story', [Balibo] is a travesty of omissions.
"In eight of 16 drafts of his screenplay, David Williamson, the distinguished Australian playwright, graphically depicted the chain of true events that began with the original radio intercepts by Australian intelligence and went all the way to Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, who believed East Timor should be `integrated' into Indonesia.
"This is reduced in the film to a fleeting image of Whitlam and [Indonesian President] Suharto in a newspaper wrapped around fish and chips," said Pilger, who in 1994 released East Timor: Death of a Nation.
Paul Cleary, a former adviser to the East Timor Government and author of Shakedown: Australia's Grab for Timor Oil, also lambasted the film, claiming it failed to reflect revelations that the intelligence agencies of Australia, in particular (but also the United States and Britain), failed to act on the knowledge Indonesia was preparing to invade East Timor.
Had they done so, those journalists might have survived, Cleary stated in a Sydney Morning Herald opinion piece.
Allowed a right of reply in the same piece, Connolly expressed a desire to respect an audience's "ability to use the film as a springboard to explore in detail the issues raised".
Last week, chatting amiably yet frankly, Connolly was more than happy to revisit the issue.
"You expect there to be some form of robust discussion, but I do have a view that this journey from being a film about our point of view to being about the Timorese point of view was such a profound one ... people like Paul Cleary would prefer it was all about the corridors of power in Australia and I was angry with his article because he implied that somehow the film lost courage by not showing that, that somehow the Government had got to me or something.
"I chose not to make a documentary but to do a feature film . . .
"I think the film channels the amazing work of people over the last 35 years - like Jolliffe, Pilger, the families of the Balibo Five, a lot of Timorese activists."
Yet Connolly has spoken about the wider issues concerning East Timor.
Last year, at an International Press Institute meeting in Helsinki, he condemned Whitlam, as well as then US President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for their complicity in the Indonesian invasion.
Since its Australian release last year, Balibo has become part of the East Timor story.
In December, the Indonesian Government banned a screening by the Jakarta International Film Festival.
But the Indonesian Journalists Association, making a stand for freedom of speech, screened it regardless.
Among those who watched the film was an Indonesian army officer who admitted in a subsequent magazine interview that he had been in Balibo at the time and that the journalists were executed to keep them from telling the truth about the invasion.
"No-one could deny the impact of the film now," Connolly said.
"A generation of Indonesians are watching this film illegally.
"Justice will only happen when a generation of Indonesian people demand of their government the truth of what happened."
Balibo is screening at cinemas nationwide.
