Forbidden Lie$ tells the story of Norma Khouri, who shot to fame when her book, Forbidden Love, became a bestseller. The book claimed to tell the story of Khouri’s best friend, who was murdered by her own family because she dated a man of a different religion. Readers and members of the media around the world joined a campaign against the practice of honour killings in Jordan and other countries. The only problem was that Khouri’s book was a fake—a fact that came to light after a few Jordanian journalists pointed out numerous factual errors in the story.
Forever is a Dutch film made by the experienced documentarian Heddy Honigmann. Its subject is Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris but its scope includes life and death, history and memory, art and beauty.
This year’s winner of the People’s Choice Award for Most Popular International Film was Persepolis, a mostly black-and-white animated film adapted from the graphic memoir by Marjane Satrapi, who documents her childhood in Iran, first living under the Shah and then under fundamentalist Islam.
Fifteen-year-old Tracey Berkowitz is on a bus, naked except for a shower curtain. How did she get there? Which pieces of her life story as a misfit are reality and which are fantasy? Director Bruce McDonald tackles these questions by fracturing the screen and showing multiple views in constantly changing visual configurations.
The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence is a classic Canadian novel, and nothing short of a great film would do it justice. Kari Skogland's film is a subtle meditation on Prairie social life and taboos in the mid-twentieth century. It’s also a complex and funny story about the difficult reversal of roles when parents need to be cared for by their grown children.
Like Adrian Mole, the famous teenaged diarist created by Sue Townsend, the unnamed hero of Maureen Fergus’s Exploits of a Reluctant (But Extremely Goodlooking) Hero (Kids Can Press) is precocious and self-confident without much talent or intelligence to back up his bravado.
For Myles Hildyard, a British aristocrat, the Second World War was an adventure like no other. He joined a local military unit in the late 1930s and saw action throughout the entire war, stationed in the Middle East, North Africa, Crete and western Europe in the cavalry and tank brigades, and as an information officer. His experiences are documented in It Is Bliss Here: Letters Home 1939–1945 (Bloomsbury), a startlingly honest, funny and compelling collection of letters to his family.
The Canadian director Gary Burns’s take on the urban and suburban condition has always been fictional, until now. Burns teams up with Jim Brown to tackle life in the cul de sac in Radiant City, a film that combines commentary on design, culture and planning with the story of one family who have embraced the malls, wide roads and neat lawns of suburbia.
>After filming Elliot Lovett, an American G.I., for a study of soldiers and their music, the Australian documentary filmmaker George Gittoes followed Lovett back to his home in the Brown Sub ghetto in Miami. The neighbourhood he found there was every bit as dangerous and chilling as the streets of Baghdad, and the comparison is always under the surface in the resulting film, Rampage.
