Armed with a camera and a mission
By Posted Thu, Apr 12 2007
Nessen realized what was happening in western-most Aceh “was the most important story there, perhaps the most powerful story in all of Southeast Asia.”
He turned his camera on the Free Aceh Movement (Gerakan Aceh Merdeka or GAM) and the villages they traveled fighting the Indonesian government in his documentary, The Black Road: On the Front Line of Aceh's War. According to Nessen, he remains the only journalist to live and travel with the guerillas in the decades-long conflict.
Hunted and imprisoned for revealing the Acehnese struggle for independence largely unknown around the world, Nessen was released from prison after 39 days for what he calls made-up immigration charges to justify almost killing him and holding him for weeks.
“It's not just a story of suffering, but of collective, cooperative effort and liberation,” Nessen says. “As an outsider, you feel lifted and willing to do a whole lot of risky things when you are in the presence of a risk-taking people's movement like that, when you have little kids and old folks and everyone in between all focused on accomplishing something. In order to tell the Acehnese story properly even as a print journalist, I had to immerse myself in their lives, in their reality. Bit by bit, I was taking the same risks they were taking. It was a natural, ineluctable process.”
Nessen remains banned from the country, and in November 2006 the government denied his film entry into the Jakarta International Film Festival on the grounds that it “might disturb Indonesia's security.”
“I made this film because it's the job of a journalist to show what governments don't want the world or their own citizens to know,” Nessen told the Indonesian magazine Tempo. “I made it because it seems I was the only one who could or would, the only one willing to take the risks necessary to film what was happening in the villages of Aceh. Making the film was an obligation to the overwhelming majority of people in Aceh who have suffered for more than fifty years under Indonesian rule.
“The film is a more positive view of Aceh's struggle for independence than Indonesians normally get. I narrate the film as my personal story but it puts the viewer in the shoes of the Acehnese, allowing the viewer to ask him or herself, 'If I were Acehnese, might I also have chosen to pick up a gun to fight Indonesian rule?'”
The Black Road: On the Front Line of Aceh's War has received international recognition but its response in Aceh is an audience that Nessen feels has a right to see the film. “The response in Aceh has been wholly positive,” Nessen says in the Tempo interview. “The Acehnese, including former GAM fighters, have taken it on themselves to reproduce DVDs of the film. There are tens of thousands of copies in Aceh. It plays at almost every coffee shop in the territory.”
Nessen has plans for future film projects on Africa's resource conflicts and is currently a correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle in India and Southeast Asia.