Sydney filmmaker Anna Broinowski's excellent 2008 documentary, Forbidden Lie$, started out testing the credibility of an eerily plausible liar and became a provocative - even disturbing- examination of the relationship between journalist and subject.
Her new film is an altogether less interesting piece of work. Outraged by plans for coal-seam gas mining (read: fracking) in a park near her Erskineville home, she decided to make a propaganda film and travel to North Korea to take lessons from the specialists.
Never mind that the underlying concept bespeaks a dismally shallow understanding of what constitutes propaganda. Set aside, too, whether a film industry for which "Dear Leader" Kim Jong-II quite literally wrote the book is a useful model.
Broinowski's crash course in the use of heroic drama as an ideological tool reduces her mentors to figures of fun. Her claim to be "on the same ideological page" as them is so lame it doesn't even get on to all fours.
The climactic film within a film, The Gardener, is more polished than her teachers' work, but no less naff, and it trivialises the cause she purports to care for. Some genuinely worthwhile sequences, such as the moving interview with a Queensland farmer on fracked land, seem to belong in another film.
