Indonesian troops invade East Timor in 1975 and over the next two decades kill a substantial portion of the population, roughly a third by some estimates cited in the film, while Western governments look away. Journalist John Pilger travels to the territory with cameraman David Munro to document what that occupation actually looked like: mass graves, survivor testimony, and footage of a population living under military control. Pilger's argument is not just about Jakarta. He traces the arms sales, diplomatic cover, and economic interests, including Australia's dealings over the Timor Gap oil and gas reserves, that let Western nations treat the killing as background noise for twenty years. Central Independent Television broadcast the film in 1994, and it is built as an exposé in the reporter-to-camera tradition, Pilger naming officials and companies rather than describing the atrocities in the abstract. The film's case is that the genocide continued because it was profitable and diplomatically convenient for governments that called themselves allies of human rights elsewhere.