Cirrus@Austlit

'Datson Angel is a turbo-charged adventure into the dark heart of 1980s Australia: a place completely alien, yet frighteningly similar, to today.

'EVERYTHING IN THIS BOOK HAPPENED . . .

'At seventeen, aching to begin her adult life, Anna Broinowski is precocious, naive and in her first year of Arts/Law at Sydney University. Anna's already convinced she knows how the world works, but O-week changes that. She watches Australia's drunk future captains of industry terrorise freshers and the Wesley grapevine starts buzzing with reports that a Sancta Sophia first-year has been gangbanged by the St Paul's seniors, who pinioned her to the rose garden lawn with croquet hoops.

'Nothing is what she thought it'd be . . . until the Sydney Uni Dramatic Society (SUDS) leads Anna to her people. New dreams are made. Acting, playing violin, auditioning for NIDA, losing her virginity. And then Peisley, a gentle giant with calves as muscly as the Hulk's, talks of a hitchhiking trip up north. And, after agreeing on three rules - Never split up. Remain platonic. Accept every lift that gets them closer to Darwin - Anna decides to go.

'Hitchhiking the highways leads her to a dystopian dustbowl of raging paranoia and ghastly beauty, a flyblown asylum where outsiders must adapt or perish, and women teeter on an existential knife-edge, between hatred and annihilation. Anna's is a tale of danger, unravelling sanity and blossoming love. It details the extreme things that happen when urban feminism is plucked from the Ivory Tower and forced to confront the toxic misogyny in the guts of the Australian soul. In her travels, Anna will learn that the line between victim and survivor can be as cruel as luck and as random as a shiny blue Datson on a red dirt road.

'Based on her battered travel diary, Datsun Angel is a riveting and darkly funny true story of a sex, drugs and violence-fuelled adventure through the brutal 1980s Australian outback. It is a feminist Mad Max, told through a #MeToo filter.' (Publication summary)

'In 1996, Pauline Hanson gave a speech that changed Australia. Attacking Asian and Indigenous people and foreign aid, Hanson unleashed a Pandora’s box of violence and division on the progressive country Prime Minister Keating had positioned as ‘part of Asia’. After her famous defeat in 1998, her political downfall seemed assured – but she stayed firmly in the spotlight, whether she was being locked up for electoral fraud or jiving on Dancing with the Stars. Now, after almost two decades in the political wilderness, Hanson is back and more powerful than ever. Before One Nation’s astonishingly successful return to Australian politics in 2016, multi-award-winning filmmaker Anna Broinowski had complete access to Hanson and her ‘Fed Up’ election campaign. Broinowski followed Hanson as she flew from Rockhampton to Sydney to Great Keppel Island and beyond in her Jabiru two-seater. The crazies, the madness, the division and the hatred Hanson attracts and inflames were all on show – sometimes funny, sometimes frightening, and often surreal. At the time, no one was taking Pauline Hanson and One Nation’s political chances seriously, but Broinowski quickly realised that there was a movement forming behind her. Pauline Hanson’s explosive political journey mirrors Australia’s own: from left-leaning multiculturalism, to the divided landscape we live in now. And, alongside the shocks of Brexit and Trump’s presidency, Hanson's resurrection reflects a broader global trend towards outrageous far-right outsiders.' (Publication Summary)

'We were all propagandists; the only differences were our goals.'

Looking for respite from her crumbling marriage and determined to stop a coal seam gas mine near her Sydney home, filmmaker Anna Broinowski finds wisdom and inspiration in the strangest of places: North Korea. Guided by the late Dear Leader Kim Jong Il's manifesto The Cinema and Directing, Broinowski, in a world first, travels to Pyongyang to collaborate with North Korea's top directors, composers and movie stars to make a powerful anti-fracking propaganda film.

The Director is the Commander centres around the bizarre twenty-one day shoot Broinowski did in North Korea to make her documentary, Aim High in Creation! She meets and befriends artists and apparatchiki, defectors and loyalists, and gains a new insight into the world's most secretive regime. Her adventures are set against a parallel exploration of propaganda in general: both in its ham-fisted North Korean form and its sophisticated but no less pervasive incarnation in the corporate West.

Funny, multi-layered and utterly compelling, The Director is the Commander is a gripping account of an extraordinary journey inside a nation we can usually only see from the outside looking in.

'When Anna Broinowski wanted to make an anti-mining protest film, she turned for help to the masters of propaganda - the North Koreans.'

'Fearing that a gas mine is about to be built right near her home, Anna Broinowski (Forbidden Lie$, MIFF 2007), in a world first, goes to Pyongyang in North Korea to meet the masters of propaganda filmmaking: directors, cinematographers, composers and movie stars. Over three weeks they instruct her on how to make a drama in which "heroic workers" overthrow the evil gas miners – executed in the Dear Leader's proudly melodramatic style. As part of her research, Anna even acts in a North Korean movie, playing an "evil American secretary" in a military thriller being shot on a real, captured US spy ship, the USS Pueblo.

'Back in Sydney, Anna's fearless Western cast follow North Korean instructions in a bizarre Kim Jong-il boot camp – with socialist ideology training sessions, the repetitive use of song, workshops on how to act with a "love for the common people" and "hatred of the class enemy" – culminating in an uplifting, anti-capitalist plot guaranteed to inspire workers and farmers everywhere to throw off their capitalist shackles and unite!

'Whether the actors deliver a film so powerful it stops the mine, and is hailed from Pyongyang to Cannes as the greatest thing since Dogme, or whether it's a glorious turkey of which only Kim's son (and perhaps Lars Von Trier) can be proud, one thing's for sure: the MIFF Premiere Fund-supported Aim High in Creation! (which world premieres at MIFF) is a film that forges an astonishingly human bond between North Korea's filmmakers and their Western counterparts, proving that no matter what type of enemy you're fighting, we are a family.'

'In July 2004, Norma Khouri, best-selling author of 'Forbidden Love', was exposed as a fake. She'd won fame and fortune as a Jordanian virgin with a fatwah on her head for her campaign against honour killings. But she was really Norma Bagain, an alleged Chicago con artist on the run from the FBI for $1 million of fraud. Spinning murder, greed and literary scandal into a web that entangles us all, FORBIDDEN LIE$ is a real-life thriller for our time.'

Source: Screen Australia.