Love and revolution in East Timor

For a documentary maker, there can be few things more exciting than having a potential subject offer up a cache of original footage. When that subject is a former resistance worker who risked her life carrying messages from a jailed political leader it just gets better and better.

And if the resistance worker has not retreated into oblivion with the leader's release but is now his wife and first lady of his independent nation, it is a situation little short of documentary-making nirvana.

Such was the treasure trove offered to filmmakers Alex Meillier and Tanya Ager Meillier, who wanted to make their own film about East Timor after working there for the United Nations in 2005. "The trailer that we edited for the [UN] film was so amazing that every UN official in New York wanted to be in the film and they ruined it," Meillier says.

Having just edited Michael Moore's Capitalism: a Love Story, they had funds to pursue their own project. "We decided to [go] back [to East Timor] and tell the story. We started researching key members of the resistance," he says.

That was how Australian-born Kirsty Sword, now Kirsty Sword Gusmão, wife since 2000 of East Timor's prime minister, Xanana Gusmão, came to their notice. The New York-based couple (director-screenwriter Meillier is American while his wife, producer-screenwriter Ager Meillier, is British-born) saw her story as a metaphor for East Timor's story.