As a child growing up Thomas Watson knew that his grandmother had survived the horrors of a prisoner-of-war camp. But like so many others who suffered in the Second World War, she never spoke about it.
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The ordeal of Yvonne Watson (nee Holman) was largely shrouded in mystery.
Mrs Watson spent four years as a captive with thousands of other Dutch civilians who were incarcerated when Indonesia fell to Japan in 1942.
"I'd known that she had survived a Japanese-run concentration camp in Indonesia, which was then the Dutch East Indies, and that her experience was incredibly violent," Mr Watson said.
He knew little else, but carried his curiosity into adulthood.
After his grandmother's death in 2013, Mr Watson teamed up with filmmaker Jean-Baptiste Breliere to make a feature-length documentary about Mrs Watson's experiences titled The World Ended on Mango Street.
"My grandmother was imprisoned in a small hut with around about 15 other women in Mango Street Number 7," Mr Watson said.
"Her whole life as she knew it in Indonesia completely ended on Mango Street — that's where the title comes from."
Production of the film has sent Mr Watson on an emotional quest to discover the truth about his courageous grandmother who survived the starvation and disease of the camp, living to be 92.
When the Japanese invaded the Dutch East Indies in 1942, the young Yvonne Holman was studying to become a lawyer.
"The Japanese basically came in and ordered all of the Dutch families to evacuate. They were sent to what they called prisoner-of-war camps but were in fact concentration camps," Mr Watson said.
The Australian War Memorial estimates that some 130,000 allied civilians were interned by the Japanese during their occupation of the Dutch East Indies, including American, British and Australian civilians.
Mr Watson believed most evidence of what went on in the camps had been destroyed.
"A lot of the buildings have been destroyed and a lot of the first-hand witnesses have either died or disappeared," he said.
However, he does have the first-hand account of his great uncle, Robert Holman, who was a 10-year-old boy when he was separated from his mother and imprisoned in a boys' camp in Semarang.