Post film Q&A screening with director John Hughes.

TWILIGHT TIME is a gripping profile of one of the world’s greatest scholars of military strategy and defence, the Australian professor Desmond Ball – the man who unflinchingly examined Cold War nuclear strategy and advocated for the sovereign defence of Australia.

Hailed by former US president Jimmy Carter as “the man who saved the world” for his work proving the fallacy of the doctrine of ‘limited nuclear war’, Ball is remembered as the ‘insurgent intellectual’ whose life-long investigation of controversial US military base Pine Gap enraged Australia’s defence establishment. Ball’s opposition and activism against the American war in Vietnam in the 1960s earned him decades of ASIO surveillance. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Ball offered guidance on signals intelligence to ethnic minorities targeted by the Burmese military. His work on Australian governments’ complicity with the Indonesia invasion of East Timor in 1975 gave the public a taste of secrets governments would prefer remain hidden.

Employing a wealth of archival footage, veteran documentarian John Hughes (Senses of Cinema, MIFF 2022) captures the heated atmosphere of late-20th-century geopolitics through a distinctly Australian lens, bearing witness to events such as US ambassador Ed Clarke’s ‘peppercorn’ speech at North West Cape, Gough Whitlam’s infamous dismissal from office and the civil unrest that rocked the nation during the Vietnam War. Twilight Time is a rich – and tremendously timely – look at Australia’s complicated involvement in global strategy, defence policy and mass surveillance.

Rating

CTC

Duration

110 MINS