Review by John Packman.

If you live somewhere that has electricity, you can probably recall the whirlwind of controversy surrounding James Frey's bestselling memoir A Million Little Pieces and his subsequent admission that most of it didn't actually, you know, happen. Anna Broinowski's documentary Forbidden Lie$ attempts to dissect a similar quagmire, this time centered on the veracity of author Norma Khouri's supposed non-fiction novel about honour killings in Jordan, Forbidden Love. Upon its release, Khouri's book topped global best-seller lists and earned her a considerable amount of media attention while ostensibly bringing attention to her pet cause. Unfortunately, a small cadre of Western journalists and Jordanian women's rights advocates contended that her story of the murder of a young Muslim woman for dating a Christian was almost certainly a fabrication, and Khouri found herself under an increasingly unfriendly spotlight.

After twenty or so minutes of somewhat obligatory exposition (and frankly unnecessary TV-style boingy sound effects and green-screen sequences), Broinowski decides to allow Khouri the chance to exonerate herself and prove the truthfulness of her story to her detractors. This is where the film shifts gears from a relatively standard biographic documentary into more self-reflexive and ambiguous territory. In interviews, Khouri proves to be a remarkably slick and charismatic individual, but as the evidence against her story mounts, cracks begin to show in her facade. Forbidden Lie$ is fascinating in a formal sense because its subject matter, being largely dictated by the actions of an individual who is almost pathologically dedicated to self-preservation, is constantly erased and rewritten; Khouri's attempts to rationalize her methods change gears so much that the film essentially reboots every time she is caught in a lie. Broinowski and the talking heads at the margins of the film continually strip away layers of artifice to reveal yet more artifice. The film raises pertinent questions about the relationship between truth and art, as well as inadvertently suggesting that the documentary form itself can only examine the truth insofar as its subjects possess any truth to examine. Despite moments of technical sloppiness and an eleventh-hour revelation of questionable merit, Forbidden Lie$ is by and large a success.

Forbidden Lie$
Anna Broinowski | Australia | 2007 | 108min

Thur. Sept. 27 | 6:15pm | Empire Granville Theatre
Sun. Sept. 30 | 8:45pm | Empire Granville Theatre
Fri. Oct. 5 | 3:30pm | Empire Granville Theatre