Nick Broomfield Trains Sights On Sarah Palin in Channel 4 Documentary

From the Guardian.co.uk: Nick Broomfield Trains Sights On Sarah Palin in Channel 4 Documentary
She is the self-styled hockey mom and "mama grizzly" who once said she was prepared to rise up up on her hind legs to protect her cubs.

But darling of the American right Sarah Palin has found a new adversary – award-winning British director Nick Broomfield, who claims to have uncovered dark suspicions and feuding within her coterie and likens her Alaskan home of Wasilla to David Lynch's dystopian fictional mountain town Twin Peaks.

The documentary maker, who has previously tackled Kurt Cobain, Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur, and Heidi Fleiss, is currently putting the finishing touches to his film Sarah Palin – You Betcha!.

But he is understood to have found what he calls his quest to find the "real" Sarah Palin something of an ordeal.

During filming for the project, which will premiere at the Toronto Film Festival next month – prior to a Channel 4 broadcast later this year – Broomfield tried to quiz the former vice-presidential candidate at a public appearance in May this year.

Channel 4 is tightly guarding the contents of the film, but in a clip that has appeared on YouTube, Broomfield can be seen being escorted from the California event after breaking a ban on questions from the floor and asking Palin: "Do you think your political career is over?"

Channel 4 would not confirm whether Broomfield finally meets Palin. But it did confirm that he spent much of his time filming in Wasilla, Palin's Alaska home where she was governor between 2006 and 2009.

Broomfield met school friends, family members and former colleagues of Palin who have now become disillusioned with her, including her ex-legislative director John Bitney and former Alaskan senate president Lyda Green.

Bitney speaks bitterly of his experiences working with her, insisting she often ignored him and openly spent time on her BlackBerry when he was talking with her.

"It was frustrating to set up a meeting with legislative leadership to talk about a piece of legislation or a bill or an issue or something that needed to be worked out," Bitney tells the film. "She was very unengaged in the conversation."

Bitney's assessment is supported in the film by Green. "I never felt that Sarah was ever connected to the business in the building, what was going on in the Capitol," she tells the film. "It was always I thought a very cursory attendance when she was there, a lack of interest, and she generally had her two BlackBerries and was texting most of the time."

Other interviewees in the film are thought to include figures connected with the July 2008 Troopergate affair when Palin was alleged to have tried unsuccessfully to have her former brother-in-law, state trooper Mike Wooten, fired.

Broomfield says that his film shows a small town fraught with feuds where close friends have become bitter enemies and the question on everyone's lips is, "are you with her or against her".

"People are frightened to talk," added Broomfield. "Wasilla makes Twin Peaks look like a walk in the park. It's a devout evangelical community – 76 churches with a population of only six thousand."

Broomfield's films tend to make the news. In his 1998 film Kurt & Courtney, Cobain's widow Courtney Love withdrew her support from the film, which suggested that Cobain had been murdered and did not commit suicide.

Broomfield's other celebrated films include His Big White Self, about South-African far-right leader Eugène Terre'Blanche, Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, the story of America's first woman serial killer Aileen Wuronos and Biggie and Tupac, a documentary on the deaths of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls and the East Coast/West Coast, hip-hop/rap rivalry.