AustLit

East Timor is a country of which the totality of feature films made in or about it are history films, including East Timor’s first locally controlled feature film, Beatriz’s War (East Timor-Australia, 2013). Beatriz’s War places at the centre of its story a historical event, but surprisingly remediates it through a French film set in the sixteenth century, The Return of Martin Guerre (1982). This article investigates the former’s use of the latter in terms of the desire for verifiability, stories which a polity believes are useful, the failure of truth commissions in East Timor, and the need for local witness to make stories have meaning with respect to issues in the present.