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NEW Australian documentary Forbidden Lies (Anna Broinowski, 2007) is a compelling narrative about the unreliability of narratives, at the end of which the viewer might well be left feeling they know a lot less about anything than they did going in. Mimicking its intriguing and frustrating subject, the film repeatedly tells all, only to immediately deny everything. As such, it draws into question the nature of truth itself.
Truth is particularly important to this film as it examines the furore surrounding the 2004 memoir Forbidden Love by Norma Khouri. The book details an unconsummated love affair in Jordan between an Islamic woman and a Christian man, a relationship that led to the woman's death at the hands of her father in 1 997. The victim, Dalia, is described in the book as Khouri 's closest friend. Her murder drives Khouri to flee Jordan and write a book that would tell the world about the horrors of the country's culture of 'honour killings'. Snapped up by publishers on the strength of a synopsis, the book went on to become a worldwide bestseller, finding fans in powerful places. One of Dick Cheney's daughters helped Khouri, apparently a Jordanian refugee, find a new life in Australia. There, the author became the figurehead of an international movement to outlaw the 'honour killings' apparently rife in Islamic countries.
The film spends its first fifteen minutes retelling these events, including sometimes uncomfortable reconstructions of the forbidden romance and subsequent death at the centre of the book. The tale is one of both rags to riches and righteous vengeance, from barbaric oppression to beachfront paradise, a story seemingly destined for blockbuster adaptation.
As it is, none of Khouri's book is true.
Welcome to my lies: the life of Norma Khouri
Forbidden Lies successfully opens with a recreation of the apparent con Khouri pulled on a credible public, a public all too willing, it would seem, to be shocked by atrocities perpetrated in a culture understood by few throughout the Western world. As a local musician plays a moving tribute to the murdered Dalia, we see a figure walk purposefully, seemingly to victory, across undulating dunes - only for the figure to turn to sand as the first objection is raised.
The...