Anna Broinowski

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]