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Adegan dalam film ini - sebuah konfrontasi antara Horta dan East - yang sepenuhnya fiktif. Ia ditulis ke dalam film untuk menghadapi para penonton dengan point jelas: mengapa begitu banyak yang memikirkan kelima wartawan ketika banyak sekali orang Timor yang mati? Kenyataannya bahwa mereka yang berkampanye- dan masih berkampanye- untuk keadilan untuk kelima wartwan Balibo juga berkampanye untuk kemerdekaan Timor Leste. Para wartawan dibunuh karena mereka berusaha untuk memberitahu dunia kebenaran tentang Timor Leste. Manuel da Silva, seorang prajurit Fretilin yang juga adalah salah satu orang terakhir yang meninggalkan Balibo pada 16 Oktober 1975 kemudian menjelaskan kepada Koronial dalam pemeriksaan resmi:
"Alasan saya datang untuk menjadi saksi karena saya percaya bahwa wartawan adalah martir untuk Timor Leste dan saya percaya mereka adalah orang Timor juga."
Sebagaimana Roger East yang asli: dia adalah orang yang benar-benar berkomitmen ? sebuah kenyataan yang diakui Horta i - "didorong oleh rasa yang mendalam."1
It is worth quoting from Jose Ramos-Horta's 1987 memoir (pages 100-1):
"Roger had come to East Timor at my invitation in October, leaving behind a well-paid job as Public Relations Officer.
I had told Roger about my idea of setting up a news agency, to be called "East Timor News Agency" or simply ETNA. I viewed such an agency as an indispensable instrument of the struggle, especially since ANTARA, the Indonesian news agency, was flooding the world with misinformation and outright lies about the situation in East Timor. I gave Roger carte blanche to run the agency, and secured for him access to all Fretilin leaders and daily briefings on the military situation, as well as off-the-record analyses of our plans to deal with the coming invasion.
To launch ETNA, I worked out a simple scheme: I arranged an exclusive interview for Roger with six Fretilin soldiers who had been in Balibo and actually witnessed the fall of the town and the killing of the five Australian newsmen by Indonesian troops. No other journalist had such a privilege, and Roger scooped everybody else. The next day, his bylines were featured front-page in most Australian newspapers, and ETNA began to be quoted.
The Reuters boss in Sydney fired an angry telex to his stringer in Dili for missing the story! The stringer justified her failure with the charge that ETNA was a semi-official agency for Fretilin. Within days, newspapers that had already commissioned Roger to work for them sent telexes terminating his contract. Reuters mounted a campaign to discredit Roger and our agency. I remember seeing Roger visibly hurt by this setback, particularly since the back-stabbing was carried out by a fellow journalist. In retrospect, I believe the whole incident could have been avoided had I acted more sensibly by inviting the stringer to the interview.
In the days before the invasion, when all other foreign correspondents had left the country, Roger was flooded with requests for stories. Even the Sydney bureau chief for Reuters phoned Roger, pleading with him to be their special correspondent. I was with him at the time and heard him saying, "I will file for you, but I am doing it for the Timorese, not for you." Roger was driven by a profound sense of mission. He was not a Fretilin partisan as his detractors claimed. He cared about the Timorese and felt very strongly that the Australian public ought to know the truth. He was angry at his government's cowardice and connivance with Indonesia."
1 J. Ramos-Horta, Funu: The Unfinished Saga of East Timor, Red Sea Press, New Jersey, 1987, p 101.
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