Australia,
2007, 106 min
Shown in 2008
CREDITS
- dir
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Anna Broinowski
- prod
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Sally Regan, Antonio Zeccola, Anna Broinowski
- scr
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Anna Broinowski
- cam
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Kathryn Millis, Toby Oliver
- editor
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Alison Croft, Vanessa Milton
- source
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Becker Entertainment, Level 1, 11 Waltham Street, 2064 Artarmon, Australia. FAX: 61 2 9439 1827. EMAIL: aliy@beckers.com.au
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COMMENTS
Winner of Documentary Feature Special Jury Prize at the 2008 Golden Gate Awards. Director Anna Broinowski in attendance.
OTHER
Norma Khouri’s memoir was an international sensation: the Jordanian virgin fled to the West to escape a fatwa after speaking out against the “honor killing” of her best friend Dalia. Her book, Honor Lost (titled Forbidden Love outside the US), published as “a harrowing true story” in the same year that the United States invaded Iraq, was a marketing triumph for international publishing and media companies eager to promote tales of Arab and Muslim patriarchal barbarism. Her publishers and promoters profited while Khouri worked the talk show and lecture circuit—no matter that the book was riddled with factual errors, including the location of Jordan. Then, in July 2004, the Sydney Morning Herald exposed her story as a hoax. In fact, she was Norma Bagain, a Chicago-raised real-estate agent and married mother of two under investigation for fraud. Khouri denounced her critics as quibblers and vowed to prove that Dalia and her story were real. But when the filmmaker travels to Jordan with Khouri, a bodyguard and a film crew, that proof failed to materialize. On camera, Khouri improvises, evades and spins her account with dizzying speed. The filmmaker plays with our sense of reality in melodramatic reenactments from Khouri’s story and interviews with central characters in starkly stylized settings. One version counters another at a thrilling pace. Is Norma Khouri a selfless writer and activist? Or a charlatan? Forbidden Lie$ lets us be the judge.
—Kathleen Denny
FACTOID #202
At the 1978 SFIFF, Paul Mazursky received a tribute at the Palace of Fine Arts. Apparently, the facility’s janitorial staff had not been notified, and the padlocked doors of the Palace had to be cut so the filmmaker and his audience could be let in.
