Fiery maker of passionate films dies Dennis O'Rourke, documentary filmmaker of The Good Woman of Bangkok. Dennis O'Rourke, the documentarian whose films The Good Woman of Bangkok and Cunnamulla won praise and enemies in equal measure, died on Saturday, aged 67, from a rare form of cancer. Some of his peers remembered him on Monday as a man whose personality was as passionate and divisive as the films he made. "He was a hard-living bloke, and for me very inspirational," said Tom Zubrycki. He was one of the first documentary filmmakers to get his films into the mainstream - he got his film Shark Callers of Kontu screened at the Opera House in 1982, when nobody was doing that. O'Rourke's early films were made in Papua New Guinea, where he arrived just as the former colony was making the transition to independence. His films were political as well as anthropological and he frequently did everything himself - camerawork, interviewing and sound recording. He made five films in PNG, and two in Australia, but it was his 1991 documentary The Good Woman of Bangkok for which O'Rourke is most likely to be remembered. In the film, he became almost as much a subject as Aoi, the Thai prostitute whose life he documented and whose bed he shared. "It was really pushing the boundaries, but it's now seen as a classic," said Zubrycki. I thought maybe he'd gone a little far. Back then documentary liked to see itself as pure even though it wasn't necessarily so, and Dennis started to challenge those preconceptions. Fellow documentary maker Bob Connolly recalls that O'Rourke began at the ABC as an assistant gardener, landed a job as an assistant cameraman and, impatient at the prospect of the six-year apprenticeship, headed off to New Guinea. And he made Yumi Yet (1975) and it was an international hit. O'Rourke was a "fiery" character, Connolly said, with an "electrifying personality" that allowed him to achieve extraordinary intimacy with his subjects.