The Mother of All Lies [2023]

 Moroccan filmmaker Asmae El Moudir’s extraordinary documentary The Mother of All Lies, through defiant remembrances, delivered a powerful affirmation of how a rebellion can be delivered by reinstating suppressed memories and shattering the veil of silence. Furthermore, it demonstrated how an act of recollecting and articulating old trauma can heal wounds and enable reconciliations. That a tapestry that’s so fragile and complex can be weaved with such formal dare, narrative idiosyncrasy and stylistic ingenuity – with the director both orchestrating and participating in this expression of personal and collective catharsis – made this a work of singular brilliance. Its starting point is the lack of photographs of El Moudir’s family and herself on account of their prohibition by her stern and authoritarian grandmother Zahra. Hence, to circumvent this chasm, her father has recreated her childhood home in Casablanca, immediate neighbourhood and residents. This meticulously designed and exceptionally constructed miniature diorama added an absorbing sense of here-and-now to reminiscences of quirky old habits, memories both fond and disquieting, unreconciled familial fault-lines, and eventually a dark political episode. In 1981, the soaring prices of breads had been the final straw for the eruption of riots, which were violently crushed by the military, followed by attempted erasure, resulting in hundreds of deaths and bodies thereafter buried in nameless graves. The filmmaker’s neighbours – Said, who wrote protest poems; Abdallah, who was illegally jailed for many years; the mother of 12-year-old Fatima who was shot and her body disappeared, and finally memorialized decades later – shared their devastating stories, situating them in the miniature installations. Zahra, incidentally, might well have been personating a version of herself, and this potentially performative element further emphasized the work’s audacious fluidity.

Director: Asmae El Moudir

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film

Language: Arabic

Country: Morocco