It would be hard to find a piece of camera footage which had more influence on a nation's history. Hundreds of young men and women rushing along a dusty pathway through a cemetery, shots sounding out around them. Uniformed troops walking between gravestones picking out targets. Wounded civilians in bloodstained T-shirts and jeans, among them a man, perhaps just a boy, his white shirt turned red, sprawled across a grave, his life slipping away.
It was East Timor, November 12th, 1991. Not the first massacre to take place on the isolated south-east Asian half-island, nor the worst since its invasion by Indonesia 16 years earlier.
No, it was simply the first to be filmed.
A lone cameraman cowered behind headstones, amid the 271 victims of the attack, which would become known as the Santa Cruz massacre. Before being arrested, the film-maker buried his film at the edge of a grave. Later, it was smuggled out and the images were broadcast throughout the world, mobilising politicians and inspiring activists to take up the East Timor cause.
Among those to see the footage was an unemployed bus driver in Ballyfermot, Tom Hyland, who was so moved by it that he began to phone foreign embassies to complain about the plight of the East Timorese, and so the East Timor Ireland Solidarity Campaign was born.
The pictures had an impact which no amount of reports or documents on the human rights situation in the former Portuguese colony could have had. The freedom which East Timor eventually gained last year became virtually inevitable once they were shown.
The man behind the viewfinder, recording those scenes, was Max Stahl. Or, at least, that is one of the names he goes by.
Eleven years before that day, he was known as Christopher Max and, far from dodging bullets and trekking through war zones, he could be found toying with used egg cartons and double-sided sticky tape on day-time television.
Yes, Max or Christopher - and they are just two of his identities - was a children's TV presenter. He spent two years fronting one of Britain's biggest shows. "You might have heard of it. It was called Blue Peter," he says in a confiding tone that reveals, not so much an embarrassment about his past but, a desire to keep his true identity shrouded in secrecy.
When your business is trying to expose human tragedy which governments want covered up, as Stahl's is, you have to be crafty. One of his tricks is never to be the same person twice.
The need for so many identities was vividly illustrated when he returned to East Timor last September to cover the historic independence referendum, when he was arrested on the island of Atauro and interrogated by "a thuggish army commander. It used to be a prison island and some of the former prisoners actually had articles of mine stashed away," he says.
"They knew who I was but the security didn't and, in the end, I was actually helped off the island by security. Later, I heard someone broke into the commander's office and found my name on a death list on his desk."
Finding the real Max Stahl, then, can be something of a challenge. Reluctantly, the film-maker, who is on a short visit to Dublin, lowers his guard a little to sketch an outline of his past.
On leaving Blue Peter, as a fledgling TV celebrity, he headed for Hollywood with a dream of big-time stardom. But when he arrived at Tinseltown it turned out not to be the Holy Grail he expected. "I was appalled by it. It was the most horrible, superficial, unreal place. Nothing ever took place without vast quantities of hot air surrounding it in terms of sales pitches."
Simultaneously overwhelmed and unimpressed, he retreated to the more familiar surroundings of Central America where he had lived as a child, his father having worked as a diplomat for the British government. He settled in El Salvador for a while and started working as a reporter for the BBC. It was just before war broke out between the government and an idealistic coalition of peasants, communists, and reformers. "All of a sudden thousands of journalists arrived, all pursuing particular agendas."
The journalism he witnessed there, he says, still makes him "recoil with suspicion" when he meets people who describe themselves as journalists. "Most journalists follow each other around, creating a media circus. They repeat what each other says, and often it's wrong."
Frustrated with restrictions on his own work, he decided to cut loose and make a feature-length film about the conflict. He teamed up with an American cameraman who, coincidentally, also had a background in children's TV.
The two produced The Front Line for which one of the cameramen hid out with the Salvadorian guerrillas while the other reported from the perspective of the US-backed government forces. The film was a commercial success and won numerous awards. At the same time, it taught Stahl a lot about war and the difficulties in making documentaries about it.
"Not surprisingly, we couldn't raise a penny in Hollywood for the project so we had to go elsewhere," he says. "That's one of the problems with documentaries today. It's difficult to get backing for films for which you are allowed make choices on the spot. In most cases, you have to work within some heavily packaged and labelled product so all that remains to be done is to fill in the blanks. As a result, a lot of filmmaking is dishonest. Good storytelling is not about answering questions people thought up beforehand but asking those you would not normally ask or think of asking."
He came up against similar obstacles in Lebanon, southern Russia, and particularly East Timor. What attracted him to that conflict was the fact that it was being fought in secret and the protagonists were so unevenly matched - a small group of freedom fighters up against the might of the Indonesian army. The same factors were exactly what put off most producers.
"TV companies want action but unfortunately you can't guarantee that with a guerrilla war because, inevitably, you won't be there when the action happens. Instead, it's a bit like archaeology, you end up filming holes in the ground."
Production companies also have time constraints which work against the filmmaker. For the East Timor project, Yorkshire Television agreed to fund him and a production crew to travel to the territory for three weeks. The crew flew home when the time elapsed. Stahl stayed on for another two months, in which time he succeeded in getting a rare interview with East Timorese guerillas in a mountain hideaway, not to mention that all-important footage of the Santa Cruz massacre.
Nine years on, Stahl is still selling unconventional ideas. This time it is a feature film which he has written himself. It follows the journey of "Ming", a pet-name for the daughter of a British diplomat who travels with a UN delegation to East Timor. There she meets a world-weary film-maker and the two stumble across a massacre, which they capture on film.
Stahl plans to incorporate his own footage of Santa Cruz into the film, for which he already has one major backer in the US. He is now looking for a another in Ireland, having chosen this country to seek support partly because of its strong campaigning stance on East Timor and partly because of its buoyant film industry.
The movie, he says, is "a love story and a thriller but it also challenges people to see how images are manipulated and how the truth can be turned into the opposite of what it is. That's not a theoretical thing in the case of East Timor. I have seen the issue distorted, corrupted, diminished and reversed, and eventually blown up into a huge story. And it was always the same thing. What was going on in East Timor never changed."
