Lives on the Edge: Peace Building in a Post-Conflict Environment

Architects for Peace and Film Maker Carmela Baranowska

Special Event: Peace Building in a Post-Conflict Environment
Tuesday 13 November 2007
7-9.30pm

Victorian College of the Arts School of Film and Television - Cinema 2 (upstairs) gold coin donation

234 St Kilda Rd Southbank (between The Melburnian housing complex and NGV, behind VCA "Elizabeth Murdoch Building" (AKA the White building)

In 2006 East Timor was on the brink of civil war. Old regional and political divisions had reignited, leading to a breakdown in law and order, gang warfare, arson and looting. Lives on the Edge is a 22 minute documentary produced for the new Al Jazeera English “Witness” program. It is the first documentary to be made about the current crisis from the perspective of those ordinary people who lived through it. We follow Alexandre, Modesta, Tinho and his pregnant wife Leonisia, four of the 100,000+ internally displaced people. Unfortunately, eighteen months later, the people whose lives were documented continue to be displaced.

Carmela Baranowska is the director of “Lives on the Edge”. Her film “Scenes from an Occupation” covered the last six months of the Indonesian occupation of East Timor in 1999 and won a Rory Peck Award. She is currently completing “Welcome to Independence” about the first years in East Timor. She also received a Walkley Award for her work in Afghanistan.

Filomena Barros dos Reis is an East Timorese human rights and women’s activist based in Dili. She works as the Advisor to the Director of the Peace and Democracy Foundation. She is currently visiting Melbourne as participant in Victoria University’s AUSAID funded Australian Leadership Award Project, developing skills and potential of youth policy leaders. Filomena will respond to the film and both Filomena and Carmela will take questions from the audience.

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