The Year of Living Dangerously is a 1982 Australian romantic drama film directed by Peter Weir and co-written by Weir and David Williamson. It was adapted from Christopher Koch's 1978 novel The Year of Living Dangerously. The story is about a love affair set in Indonesia during the overthrow of President Sukarno. It follows a group of foreign correspondents in Jakarta on the eve of an attempted coup by the 30 September Movement in 1965. The film stars Mel Gibson as Australian journalist Guy Hamilton, and Sigourney Weaver as British Embassy officer Jill Bryant. It also stars Linda Hunt as a Chinese-Australian man with dwarfism, Billy Kwan, Hamilton's local photographer contact, a role for which Hunt won the 1983 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. The film was shot in both Australia and the Philippines and includes Australian actors Bill Kerr as Colonel Henderson and Noel Ferrier as Wally O'Sullivan. It was banned from being shown in Indonesia until 2000, after the forced resignation of coup-leader and political successor Suharto in 1998. The title The Year of Living Dangerously is a quote which refers to a famous Italian phrase used by Sukarno: vivere pericolosamente, meaning "living dangerously". Sukarno used the line for the title of his Indonesian Independence Day speech of 1964. Plot Guy Hamilton, a neophyte foreign correspondent for an Australian TV network, arrives in Jakarta on assignment. He meets the close-knit members of the foreign correspondent community, including journalists from the UK, the US, and New Zealand, diplomatic personnel—and Billy Kwan, a Chinese-Australian man with dwarfism of high intelligence and moral seriousness. Hamilton is initially unsuccessful because his predecessor, tired of life in Indonesia, had departed without introducing Hamilton to his contacts. He receives limited sympathy from the journalist community, which competes for scraps of information from Sukarno's regime, the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), and the conservative Muslim-dominated Indonesian military. However, Billy takes a liking to Guy and arranges interviews for him with key political figures. Billy introduces Guy to Jill Bryant, a beautiful young assistant at the British embassy. Billy and Jill are close friends, yet Billy subtly manipulates her encounters with Guy. After resisting Guy because she's returning to the UK, Jill falls in love with him. Discovering that the Communist Chinese are arming the PKI, Jill passes this information to Guy to save his life, but he wants to cover the Communist rebellion that