By Nick Bryant
BBC News, Sydney
**A film receiving its world premiere in Melbourne is likely to revive the controversy over the deaths of five foreign journalists in East Timor.**The five Australia-based correspondents died during Indonesia’s invasion of the territory in 1975.
Jakarta has always said that the five, who died in the town of Balibo, were killed in crossfire, an explanation accepted by Australian governments.
The film, Balibo, shows them being shot on the orders of Indonesian officers.
It is the first feature film to be shot in East Timor, and it tells the story of five journalists - two Australians, two Britons and a New Zealander - who were killed when Indonesian troops overran the border town of Balibo in October, 1975.
Jakarta has always maintained that the journalists were killed in an exchange of fire between its own troops and East Timorese rebels, an official explanation accepted by successive Australian governments.
But the film shows them being brutally executed, on the orders of Indonesian military chiefs.
The President of East Timor, Jose Ramos Horta, was a rebel commander at the time, and is a central figure in the film.
He claimed it was largely accurate, but that its makers were unable to convey the full horror of the killings because it would be too shocking for cinema audiences.
In Melbourne for the premiere, he claimed that the journalists were not just executed by the Indonesian military but, as he put it, “brutally, brutally tortured”.
The film makers have said that the Indonesian and Australian government’s version of what happened is absurd, a view validated by the findings of an Australian coroner in 2007.
After a fresh review of the evidence, he ruled that the journalists had been killed as they tried to surrender to Indonesian forces.
The film makers are hoping that Balibo will spur the Australian government into action.
Almost 18 months on, it still has not given its official response to the coroner’s findings - a reticence which may stem from its fear of upsetting diplomatic relations with Jakarta.