Dangerous documentary

Sean Flynn and Dana Stone on their road to nowhere

With the exhibition of Tim Page's photographs at Meta House beginning this Sunday (4th January), the opening night will also see a screening of his 1991 documentary called Danger on the Edge of Town, in which he sets out to discover the fate of his two friends who disappeared twenty years earlier. On the morning of 6 April 1970, Sean Flynn and Dana Stone set off along Highway 1 looking for the Khmer Rouge and a story, and were never seen again. Another 19 journalists and photographers met the same fate in a 21-day period at the same time. Twenty years later Page, along with a crew from Britain's Granada television set out to discover their fate. It produced answers, more questions and over time people came forward with information about the terrible fate they suffered at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. It was screened in April 1991 as part of Granada's celebration series.
Here's what Page had to say about the experience:
"In 1990, I returned to Cambodia with a TV crew from Granada Television in the UK to make a documentary called 'Danger on the Edge of Town' to try and find out all I could about their fate, I even allowed myself to hope that we might find them. Of course we didn’t but we did find people that they had stayed with, fed them and could identify them from a book of the other ‘Missing’ which I carried with me. It was an incredibly emotional and spiritual journey. Hearing of how they had been marched from place to place at night to avoid American bombing. How the people had got to know them and like them and how one day they were just taken away with their hands tied behind their backs and never seen again."
It also led Page to establish the Indochina Media Memorial Foundation, to honour the 135 photographers who died from both sides of the conflict. He also produced a book of their work with Horst Faas called Requiem, widely acknowledged as being the best book on the Vietnam War. Another book published by Page in 1995 details his investigations into the fate of his two friends, which he called Derailed in Uncle Ho's Victory Garden, whilst Perry Deane Young also wrote a book about the missing friends, titled Two of the Missing.