SFIFF Dispatch. 8.

At a San Francisco International Film Festival full of surprises (mostly on the small side), Forbidden Lie$ was one of the most satisfying. The Australian documentary by Anna Broinowski tracks the story of Norma Khouri, a Jordanian woman, with a disarmingly American way of speaking, whose best-selling book, Forbidden Love, about an honor killing in Jordan turned out to be a hoax. So did Khouri's story about being a Jordanian, as did her story about not being married, and her stories about everything else. It was only the beginning of a documentary, filled with the stylistic characteristics of page-turning fiction, that revealed a string of hoaxes conducted by a woman with a frightening gift for winning the confidence of her victims.

Drawn into Khouri's web at first, like everyone else, Broinowski does impose some journalistic standards on her subject's storytelling, and the story of the honor killing opens up into an investigation of a scam artist with victims who suffered more than the many credulous readers of her mournful tale of a Muslim girl killed by her brothers and father for dating a Christian man. It's not that these stories of honor killing don't exist, especially in Jordan. Indeed, women's rights activists in Amman are interviewed deploring Khouri for misleading the public by taking a report from a local newspaper and fictionalizing a "true" story based on a fact or two.

Forbidden Lie$ raises some troubling questions about documentaries, which seem to be better received the more their characters and story lines resemble the drama and mystery of fiction. In the marketplace, drama and intrigue sell better than truth does when you're marketing a movie. In Khouri's case, her book editors certainly thought so, and never bothered to check her facts. Only in Jordan, where the book was published, did journalists recognize that so much of the book was obviously made up. At the same time, an Australian journalist was making the same journey through the tales she told, and discovering that almost nothing she said was true. Confronted, Khouri lied again and again - like Sheherezade, trying to beguile anyone who would listen to prolong her life.

Now Norma Khouri is living in Chicago, learning that there is life after being outed as a con-woman in a documentary film. Given today's shrinking audience for documentaries, that can't be much of a risk. We learn in Forbidden Lie$ that she is no longer under investigation by the FBI, a surprising fact, given the number of people she cheated in the US. The filmmaker's suspicion is that Khouri, who is fluent in Arabic, once worked for the CIA, and may still be working for the Agency. One can only guess what she told them. And we know the kind of things that American officials are willing to believe.

Latent Argentina, which saw its North American premiere at the San Francisco fest, begins its lament for Argentina with a strikingly beautiful survey of the country's landscape, and with an inventory of Argentina's vast natural wealth, which we learn has been squandered or sold at bargain prices to foreigners as part of the country's push toward privatization in the 1980s and 1990s. That privatization ended up enriching the few people who supported it.

It doesn't take long for the intrepid director Fernando Solanas to gravitate toward his country's people, who are the real wealth of the nation. It's a tragedy that a place with so much wealth and talent has managed to impoverish itself so efficiently. It's even more remarkable that the people whom Solanas interviews hope to turn the country around, whether by resisting privatization or by reviving plans for industries less dependent on the US. The film seems to be directed at a demoralized Argentine audience, a sort of motivational sermon about what the country could have been. From the heart, Solanas is also warning that Argentina is not alone in its fate.

Posted by dwhudson at May 13, 2008 1:28 AM