In 1986, the success of the Northern Territory films led Gittoes overseas, to make "Bullets of the poets" (1987), a film about a group of Sandinista women poets who had fought in the Nicaraguan revolution. This was a turning point for Gittoes. He was influenced by Nicaraguan poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal, whose philosophy of Externalism he later described as follows: “The Externalist poets believed in using real life events and physical experiences in their poetry, instead of the imagery of the imagination. For them reality was more incredible than fantasy.” Gittoes’ key work from this period was the drawing, “The captured gun”, of a half-crippled Sandinista fighter who carried a captured American rifle adapted to use Russian ammunition, which he felt “symbolised that particular phase in the conflict ... and became a major breakthrough in my artistic career.”