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

About Some Meaningless Events [1974]

 What role must Third World cinema play in a repressive sociopolitical construct? Should it aim for socially relevant inquiries or transition into direct action? Where does art dissolve into politics as part of this exercise? And, to paraphrase Godard, how does one make not just political films but politically too? These were some of the themes touched upon in the underground, independent, experimental, pulsating, audaciously improvisational, disarming, defiant, Marxist, formally dazzling and curiously titled work About Some Meaningless Events by pioneering Moroccan filmmaker Mostafa Derkaoui who’d studied in 2 iconic film institutes – viz. L'Institut des hautes études cinématographiques in Paris (whose alumni included the likes of Malle, Resnais, Angelopoulos, Schlöndorff, Sautet, Costa-Gavras, etc.) and Łódź Film School (whose alumni included the likes of Munk, Wajda, Kieslowski, Polanski, etc.). In an interesting anecdote, upon being banned by the authorities after a single screening, it was believed to be lost and faded into oblivion until its negatives resurfaced 4 decades later in Barcelona, post which it was stunningly restored. It started along the lines of Morin and Rouch’s influential documentary Chronicle of a Summer wherein Derkaoui’s crew roamed the streets, cafés and bars of Casablanca’s working class neighbourhoods, interviewing people on their views on cinema and Moroccan cinema in particular; and then, when a young dockworker with a flamboyant Afro hairdo accidentally kills his boss during a confrontation, they decide to follow his story with the intent to explore his background, motives and in turn class divides, social injustice and exploitation. Foregrounded in thrilling vérité photography, freeform jazz score, urgency and vitality, it marvelously blended elements of both drama and documentation, thus blurring the fluid, ambiguous space between truth and artifice.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Mostafa Derkaoui

Genre: Documentary/Crime Drama

Language: Arabic/French

Country: Morocco