I saw Anna Broinowski’s Forbidden Lie$ at True/False in 2008 and was blown away by the filmmaker’s fearless experimentation with construction and story structure. The film is a portrait of Norma Khouri, a Jordanian living in exile in Australia who became a literary star when she published a purported memoir of her best friend’s honor killing. The book was eventually revealed as mostly or entirely fabricated; Khouri admitted to embellishment but insisted that the core of the story was true. Broinowski followed the disgraced author back to Jordan in the name of clearing her name, but inevitably uncovered a massive web of lies. Khouri reveals herself as a con artist for whom publishing a fake memoir (and the year of adulation and celebrity that ensued) waas jsut one act in a life-long performance; Broinowski reveals just what makes that performance work, and how Norma gets away with it.

I named Forbidden Lie$ as one of the Best Undistributed Films of last year; now, thanks to Roxie Releasing, the film is opening at the Cinema Village in New York this Friday, and in Los Angeles on April 10. Via email, I talked to Broinowski about her ongoing relationship with her subject, the inherently artificial tropes of documentary, and the natural symbiosis between a filmmaker and a con artist.

How did you discover Norma’s story, and how many of its twists and turns were you aware of when you started working on the film?

I was aware of Norma when her book first came out and she was a Jordanian celebrity in Australia, having chosen to live in exile here with the help of the Australian government, who gave her a special protection visa to help her escape the blood-thirsty Muslim terrorists who had supposedly put a fatwah on her head. But I had no interest in buying Norma’s book because the whole thing stank of anti-Arab propaganda, at a time when we were being encouraged to support the illegal invasion of Iraq.

I became keenly interested in Norma about a year later, when journalist Malcolm Knox exposed her as a hoax and a Chicago fraudster on the run from the FBI. I was hooked: what kind of woman could be so brilliant that while on the run from the FBI she could reinvent herself as a 32 year old virgin from Jordan, write a “true story” that became a best-seller around the world, and go on a book promotion tour pretending to be seeing the West for the first time, convincing the best minds in publishing and the media that she was telling the truth?

That’s when I emailed her. I said I am a filmmaker and I want to hear your side of the story. Obviously she agreed.

…Read more