Passabe is a subdistrict of the Oecusse District

Oecusse District

Oecusse is a district of East Timor. It is a coastal exclave in the western part of the island of Timor, separated from the rest of East Timor by West Timor, which is part of the province of Nusa Tenggara Timur, Indonesia, and which surrounds Oecusse in all directions except the north, where it...

 of East Timor

East Timor

The Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste, commonly known as East Timor , is a state in Southeast Asia. It comprises the eastern half of the island of Timor, the nearby islands of Atauro and Jaco, and Oecusse, an exclave on the northwestern side of the island, within Indonesian West Timor...

, which is an enclave surrounded by Indonesia

Indonesia

Indonesia , officially the Republic of Indonesia , is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Indonesia is an archipelago comprising approximately 13,000 islands. It has 33 provinces with over 238 million people, and is the world's fourth most populous country. Indonesia is a republic, with an...

n West Timor

West Timor

West Timor is the western and Indonesian portion of the island of Timor and part of the province of East Nusa Tenggara, .During the colonial period it was known as "Dutch Timor" and was a centre of Dutch loyalists during the Indonesian National Revolution...

. In the 2004 census it had a population of 7,531 people in 1,153 households. Passabe is a small village (sulo) in the subdistrict, very near the Indonesian border. It was the site of a massacre of East Timorese by pro-Indonesia militia

Pro-Indonesia militia

Pro-Indonesia militias were East Timorese paramilitary militia groups that formed to show loyalty to the Indonesian government during the movement for East Timorese independence in the late 1990s...

s in the follow-up to the 1999 referendum for East Timor's independence.

Passabe is also the name of a documentary film

Documentary film

Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...

, directed by James Leong and Lynn Lee, that takes place in the village. The film documents the lives of several Passabe residents five years after the violence, including the life of one admitted former militia member, and chronicles the ways in which the community has come to terms with what happened.

In January 2006, the film was banned at the Jakarta

Jakarta

Jakarta is the capital and largest city of Indonesia. Officially known as the Special Capital Territory of Jakarta, it is located on the northwest coast of Java, has an area of , and a population of 9,580,000. Jakarta is the country's economic, cultural and political centre...

International Film Festival.