Revered former Papua New Guinea politician Dame Carol Kidu has taken urgent legal action to stop an Australian documentary about her role in a controversial land development from premiering at a film festival next month. 
Dame Carol's lawyers sought and won a temporary injunction last week preventing the screening of The Opposition by filmmaker Hollie Fifer airing at Canada's Hot Docs, the largest documentary festival in North America.
Ms Fifer's 77-minute documentary focuses on the struggle to stop the eviction of 3000 people from a decades-old squatter community to make way for an Australian-backed development that is promising a hotel, marina and exhibition centre. It is the proposed venue for the 2018 APEC leaders' summit.
On Thursday, Dame Carol's lawyers asked the NSW Supreme Court to order all footage of her be edited out of the film on the grounds of deception and unconscionable conduct, saying Ms Fifer seriously misrepresented her role in the property stoush and ''clearly intended to dupe'' her.
But Ms Fifer's lawyers said the proposed injunction ''tears the heart of the documentary'' because the cuts in question are ''the central scenes''.
Australian-born Dame Carol, who moved to PNG at age 19 and married Sir Buri Kidu, the man who would become the country's first indigenous Chief Justice, says she believed Ms Fifer was filming her as part of a ''school project'' and not for a film that would become a commercial release.
Her barrister Bruce McClintock, SC, said in 2012 Dame Carol permitted Ms Fifer to film her on the understanding it was to be an assignment for her graduate diploma at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School and would be about her last months in politics before retiring.
Ms Fifer went on to successfully secure an $80,000 funding grant from the Documentary Australia Foundation as well as funding from Screen Australia and Screen NSW to produce a documentary pitched as a ''David-and-Goliath battle over land in Papua New Guinea''.
When Dame Carol found out the property stoush was at the heart of the documentary and that it was to screen publicly in Canada in 2016, she said she felt ''betrayed'' and ''distressed''.
Justice Michael Slattery will give judgment next week.