User:Tess.lynam/sandbox

Plot:

A young girl named Beatriz is told by her mother that she is to be married to a boy named Tomas, who's father is a leader in the village they live in. They marry in 1975 while Timor was still being occupied by Portugal. Soon after there marriage Timor declares itself independent and troops from Indonesia enter the country in an attempted to overtake Timor. Beatriz and Tomas are forced to escape into the mountains but are caught by the Indonesian troops and sent to live in the village of Kraras.

After a few years of living in the village Beatriz becomes pregnant with Tomas's son, however, before their child is born Indonesian soldiers come to massacre all male inhabitants of Kraras, as punishment for an attack by an East Timorese resistance group lead by Tomas's father. Tomas is captured by the soldiers but when Beatriz searches for him among the bodies of the dead she cannot find him.

Indonesia continues to occupy Timor until 1999 after which the United Nations gave Timor its independence. Many years after Tomas has disappeared, Beatriz still mourns his loss but refuses to believe that he is dead. One day a man claiming to be Tomas returns to the village, however, he is very different from the boy Beatriz once knew and at first she is wary of the newcomer. Slowly Beatriz begins to fall in love with the man but soon realizes that he is not who he claims to be. At a trial to determine whether or not the man is truly Tomas. Background:

The film was co-directed by Timorese filmmaker Bety Reis and Australian documentarian Luigi Acquisito. It was shot of a small budget of $200,000 on location in East Timor. The production team used crowdsourcing, sponsor donations, and other unconventional means of funding the movie; some of the staff even took pay cuts to ensure there was enough money to complete the film.

The title of the film, A Guerra da Beatriz, is in Portuguese, however, the language spoken most often is Timor's official language Tetum.

On September 17, 2013, A Guerra da Beatriz premiered in Dili, the capitol of East Timor. The film ran for five weeks in theaters and then was put in in open-air shows for places that lacked theaters of electricity. The film was seen by over 100,000 people in East Timor.