The documentary-maker Max Stahl, who has died of throat cancer aged 66, exposed the atrocities of the Indonesian government in East Timor. But he first found fame under his birth name of Christopher Wenner as a presenter of the BBC children’s television show Blue Peter.
His sporting prowess shone through when he abseiled down the east tower of Television Centre, but the overriding story of his two years on the programme (1978-80) was how he stumbled through scripts and appeared uncomfortable in front of the camera. Nevertheless, his constantly arguing over Blue Peter’s content with the editor, Biddy Baxter, who held an iron grip on the show, gave a glimpse of what he would later bring to news and current affairs television.
Displaying immense bravery, Wenner made documentaries in places of war and upheaval. His most important contribution to bringing understanding to western audiences of brutal acts committed away from the glare of the outside world came when in 1991 he travelled to East Timor (now Timor-Leste), a former Portuguese colony ruled by an Indonesian dictatorship since being invaded in 1975.
At the Santa Cruz cemetery in the capital, Dili, he filmed shocking scenes of a massacre of almost 280 peaceful demonstrators by Indonesian troops. The protesters were staging a pro-independence march following a memorial service at a nearby church where a student had been shot dead two weeks earlier.
“I was just getting my camera ready when there was a wall of sound, at least 10 seconds of uninterrupted gunfire,” he said. “The soldiers who arrived fired point blank into a crowd of a couple of thousand young people.” Before being arrested and questioned for nine hours, he buried his film in a freshly dug grave, later recovering it and smuggling it out of the country.
Back in Britain, the pictures were shown first on Channel 4 News, and then made into the film Cold Blood: The Massacre of East Timor, co-directed with Peter Gordon and broadcast in ITV’s First Tuesday documentary strand in 1992; the film was the overall winner in Amnesty International’s first UK Media Awards. So that he could protect his identity and return to East Timor, Wenner was credited as Max Stahl (his middle name and a variation on his mother’s maiden name) and continued to use it throughout his career.
A year later, John Pilger was planning his own documentary, Death of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy, interviewing witnesses to atrocities and telling the full story of the Indonesian genocide, the islanders’ struggle and the role of western governments, and Stahl contributed to the film. He travelled to East Timor independently of Pilger and the director David Munro – all of them carrying small cameras hidden in bags – to ensure that, if any of them were arrested, at least some film would get out.
Stahl shot rare footage of Fretilin guerrillas training and his interviews included one with “Delfin”, who said he became a resistance fighter after witnessing a massacre in which 66 men and boys were killed and all the women raped. He also filmed the exhumation from a mass grave of some of the dictatorship’s other victims back in Indonesia.
When Death of a Nation was screened in 1994, it elicited more than 4,000 calls a minute to a helpline number and thousands of viewers wrote to their MPs. The two documentaries – Cold Blood and Death of a Nation – were credited with raising awareness of East Timor’s plight, and were “crucial in bringing forward our liberation and saving countless lives”, said José Ramos-Horta, the political activist and East Timor’s second president after independence came in 2002 as Timor-Leste.
Stahl showed his affection for the country by making his home there until moving to Australia last year for medical treatment. He founded the Max Stahl Audiovisual Centre for Timor-Leste in Dili, an archive containing 5,000 hours of footage shot over several decades, and in 2019 he gained Timorese citizenship and was awarded the country’s highest honour, the Order of Timor-Leste.
He was born in London, the third of four sons of Gunilla (nee Stahle), the daughter of a Swedish diplomat and director of the Nobel Foundation, and Michael Wenner, of Swiss and French descent, who was a British diplomat and had served as a paratrooper and commando during the second world war.
After studying at Stonyhurst college, Lancashire, Christopher gained a degree in literature at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, where he acted with the dramatic society. He also appeared alongside fellow students in a 1975-76 touring production of The Taming of the Shrew by the Oxford and Cambridge Shakespeare Company.
He directed fringe theatre productions and acted in repertory theatre in Derby before joining Lesley Judd and Simon Groom as a Blue Peter presenter in 1978. Apart from being seen on TV as a trooper, uncredited, in the 1984 Doctor Who story The Awakening, Wenner dedicated the rest of his career to covering conflicts in faraway countries. He started by producing Death of a Priest (1981) in Guatemala and directing The Front Line and Crucified Church (both 1983), about the civil war in El Salvador, where his father had been British ambassador.
He caused concern when it was believed he had been kidnapped in Lebanon in 1985, but he turned up after being missing for 19 days and made The Hashish Connection (1988), about the country’s illegal drugs trade. Then, after his first visit to East Timor, he filmed in Serbia during the Balkans war and in Kosovo (1995-99), now using the name Max Stahl.
He also made documentaries in Russia (The Hunt for Red Mercury, 1993), Guatemala (Plunder: Mayan Treasure Hunters, 1990) and post-Soviet Georgia (Out of the Shadows, 1992) and Chechnya (Sufi in Chechnia, 1992).
While working on Blue Peter, he met Liz Trubridge, a production assistant on the programme (and later producer of Downton Abbey), whom he married in 1984. The marriage ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, Ingrid (nee Bucens), whom he married in 2008, their son, Leo, and daughter, Malin, and the sons of his first marriage, Ben and Barnaby.