Australian National University graduate John Darling lived in Bali for many years and dedicated himself to improving Australian understanding of Indonesia. He died in 2011 and his widow Sara became the project manager of a fellowship, created with the support of the Herb Feith Foundation, to honour his memory by fostering creative exchanges between the two countries through the work of filmmakers.
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The inaugural fellows of the John Darling Fellowship are ''Ilun'' Chairun Nissa and ''Heni'' Dwi Sujanti Nugraheni. Both established filmmakers, they spent two weeks at the ANU immersed in the school of archaeology and anthropology's postgraduate course Thinking With A Video Camera, and each made a short documentary about a Canberra subject.
Heni, 36, was born in Yogyakarta and after studying political science at Gajah Mada University she worked for several non-government organisations. Part of her work involved trying to reunite abandoned HIV-positive street children with their parents.
''I never studied film,'' she said. ''In 2002 I saw a brochure for a documentary film festival in Indonesia.''
It piqued her interest and, self-taught, she made a short film, The Messenger, about a man who transmitted news orally in a village. The film was accepted into the festival and in 2003 she began organising the Yogyakarta Film Festival.
In Canberra she happened upon a Vietnamese migrant, new to Canberra, who was sponsored by the owner of the city restaurant The Fish Shack, and made him the subject of her film Our Story.
Lam, a former street kid in Vietnam, was trained as a cook by the Australian-Vietnamese vocational program KOTO. Heni will expand the film by going to Vietnam to track down his siblings.
Nissa, 28, was born in Jakarta and began making films - ''teenage stuff'' - in high school. She studied film at the Jakarta Institute of Arts, graduating in 2009, and her graduation film, Full Moon, was shown at several international film festivals, including s in Melbourne and Sydney.
In 2011 she began making documentaries on issues including women's rights. Her Canberra film, Time Will Tell, is about a 75-year-old veteran who fought in the war over the Malay-Indonesian border in Borneo. She visited the Australian War Memorial to research the conflict's history.
Convener of the Visual Culture Research Program Dr Melinda Hinkson said the two women would spend some time in Sydney and Melbourne before returning to Indonesia where they would in turn mentor Australian filmmakers.
''Out of 240 million Indonesians we ended up with these two amazing women,'' Dr Hinkson said.
For more information on the Centre for Visual Anthropology click here.
