Forbidden Lie$

Norma Khouri's story was an international sensation: the Jordanian virgin fled to the West to escape a fatwa after speaking out against the “honor” killing of her best friend Dalia. Her book, Honor Lost (titled Forbidden Love outside the United States), published as “a harrowing true story” in the same year that the United States invaded Iraq, was a marketing triumph for international publishing and media companies eager to promote tales of Arab and Muslim patriarchal barbarism. Her publishers and promoters profited while Khouri worked the talk show and lecture circuit-no matter that among her book's many factual errors was the location of Jordan. Then, in July 2004, the Sydney Morning Herald exposed her story as a hoax. In fact, she was Norma Bagain, a Chicago-raised real estate agent and married mother of two under investigation for fraud. Khouri denounced her critics as quibblers and vowed to prove that Dalia and her story were real. But when the filmmaker traveled to Jordan's capital, Amman, with Khouri, a bodyguard, and a film crew, that proof failed to materialize. On camera, Khouri improvises, evades, and spins her account with dizzying speed. The filmmaker plays with our sense of reality in melodramatic reenactments from Khouri's story and interviews with central characters in starkly stylized settings. One version counters another at a thrilling pace. Is Norma Khouri a selfless activist? An artist? A charlatan? Why do people still want to believe her? Forbidden Lie$ lets us be the judge. Whatever else she is, Norma Khouri is the undisputed star of this riveting documentary.

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