Anna Broinowski is a Walkley Award-winning documentary filmmaker and author.[1][2][3][4]
Her feature documentaries are Forbidden Lie$, about Chicago hoax author Norma Khouri,[5] cited as one of the best 100 Australian films of the new millennium,[6] Aim High in Creation! (2013), about North Korea's propaganda filmmakers,[7][8] and Pauline Hanson: Please Explain (2016), about Australian Senator Pauline Hanson.[9][10]
Broinowski's broadcast documentaries include Helen's War, about anti-nuclear activist Dr Helen Caldicott's 2003 campaign against the US-led invasion of Iraq,[11][12] Heartbeat: the Miracle Inside You, about the latest advances in cardiothoracic surgery and treatment for ABC Catalyst,[13] Hell Bento!!, about the Japanese cultural underground,[14] and Sexing the Label (1996), about Sydney counter-cultures in the mid 1990s.[15]
In 2016, Broinowski won her third AFI/AACTA, for directing Pauline Hanson: Please Explain.[16] Her work has also received an Al Jazeera Golden Award,[17] a NSW Premier's Literary Award,[18] a Dendy,[19] the Rome Film Fest Cult Prize,[20] an Atom Award,[21] the St Petersburg International Media Forum Press Award for Best Film,[22] and the Writers Guild of America (East and West) Best Nonfiction Screenplay award.[23]
Broinowski has written two non-fiction books, Please Explain: the rise, fall and rise again of Pauline Hanson (Penguin 2017),[24] and the Nib Waverley Alex Buzo shortlist prize-winning The Director is the Commander (Penguin 2015)[25][26] which was released in the USA by Arcade Publishing as Aim High in Creation! in 2016.[27][28][29]
In 2016 Broinowski received a PhD from Macquarie University for her thesis on the history of deceptive techniques in documentary filmmaking, inspired by the relationship between filmmaker and subject in Forbidden Lie$.[30]