British journalist Max Stahl: ‘Filmmaking isn’t a weapon to attack’

"You see a lot of dead people and that’s shocking, but what after that?” The question was made by the British journalist Christopher Wenner, widely known as Max Stahl, who is almost a hero in East Timor after having caught on tape the Santa Cruz massacre, in 1991. In spite of having created a turning point for the East Timorese cause internationally, Stahl argued that the camera is a weapon, but never an excuse to attack.
Stahl is in Macau as the keynote speaker of a seminar on “The Past, Present and Future of East Timor” held today, at 10 pm, at the University of Saint Joseph and organised by the Macau RAI Timor Association. The British journalist has been involved in several filmmaking projects in Timor during the last six years.
In an interview for the Macau Daily Times, he confessed that his career did not change much since the 1991 massacre, but the only thing he regrets is the sort of films that are currently being screened on international television channels.
“What I have seen in international TV is frankly rubbish. […] That’s disgraceful, because the opportunity is there, as there is a lot of things to show on screen for less money that you can afford. But the problem is that the Governments’ desire to control has directly increased the censorship and the combined of influences on the image and distribution commercialization.”
“In military and political terms, there has been walls in those places where before there were really good opportunities to film. It’s dangerous now to go to Iraq and make a good film,” he said.
Apart from the difficulties to shoot in some places, the filmmaker believes that the cameras are not being used for the right means. As a result, people come across isolated messages.
“The audience outside doesn’t have good films, they just have short films chopped up and thrown out quickly. You see a lot of dead people and that’s shocking, but what’s after that? That’s not a message or a human way to do a film. Filmmaking is not a weapon to attack,” he stressed.

Building bridges

According to Stahl, filmmakers have a specific role. Filmmaking takes the audience somewhere and leads them to understand the place, its people and its history.
“It doesn’t tell people what to think, but it shows them the images of the place, a world of thoughts and experiences. In a way, they can understand all that. You have to build a bridge,” he said.
Through knowledge, the British journalist believes he can empower the viewer to understand a situation and explore it in his imagination. At the end, “if there must be a weapon involved, it’s not a weapon to attack anymore, but a weapon to empower people to do something,” he said.
That was what happened in East Timor. “In 1990, the Americans, British and French responded to the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq. They did this on the argument that it’s necessary to defend the international law, preventing small nations from being invaded by big neighbours,” he recalled.
However, Timor was too far away and the Indonesian occupation was going low profile in the international field. Yet, Stahl joined a team working for the Yorkshire Television and went to the former Portuguese colony and stayed there filming for almost three months.
Also know as the Dili massacre, the Santa Cruz incident was the shooting of East Timorese pro-independence demonstrators in the Santa Cruz cemetery in the capital, Dili, on November 12, 1991, during the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. At least 250 East Timorese were killed.
The images caught by Stahl eventually drew the international attention on Timor, which became an independent country in 2002.

Nothing changed

Born in 1954, Christopher Wenner started his career as a presenter on a British TV children’s programme, but he left to become a journalist. He worked as a filmmaker in several countries suffering of political instability, especially in Central and South America.
His interest in the Asian Portuguese colonies’ culture attracted him to East Timor. He created an East Timor Audiovisual Centre that comprises 1,000 hours of audiovisual material, filmed from 1991 to February 2010.
Asked how important was the massacre shooting for his career, Stahl ensured that in the end nothing changed. “From the professional point of view, Timor didn’t change the [his] situation that much.”
“The possibility of making films with the necessary budget was going down. If you want to do an investigation film it might take you months of filming. It takes a year, but people want to see results in five minutes,” he stressed.
After the massacre, he continued, it was almost impossible to make a movie in Timor. “My opportunities should have gone up [after the Massacre of Santa Cruz], but actually they went downhill. I manage to survive, making other things for TV.”