Year: 2023

Runtime: 86 minutes

Writer/director: Asmae El Moudir

By Sarah Manvel

In the clips of all the “Un Certain Regard” films that ran in the opening and closing ceremonies at the Cannes Film Festival, the one from “The Mother of All Lies”(2023) was of the director, hiding behind a lace curtain, her makeup smeared, as she argued with her grandmother Zahra as to whether or not she’s a film director. The grandmother insisted no, that she’s a journalist, because film directors never leave the bars. But now Asmae El Moudir has won the director prize in the “Un Certain Regard” section for this film, and jury president John C. Reilly made a point of looking her in the eyes on stage and telling her to tell her grandmother she’s a director. 

This is especially important because this documentary is built as an act of remembrance for a Casablanca which has vanished, but also as a way of establishing a reality that this grandmother cannot control. Zahra is a fiercely unpleasant woman, capable of striking an artist who paints a picture of her (on glass) not to her liking, then immediately smashing the glass with her cane as the onlookers stare in horror. Ms El Moudir begins the film with her childish realisation that her family had no photos, and the lengths she had to go to, age 12, to arrange a photograph of herself, which she then had to conceal from Zahra’s eyes for decades. (When her mother, Ouarda Zorkani, finally sees the photo, she congratulates her daughter on her deception and concealment all these years.) An explanation is given late in the film for Zahra’s ferocious need for control and her expert ability to manipulate the feelings of those around her, but when someone has an entire neighbourhood terrified of them, explanations matter less in the face of the actions. And the neighbourhood does matter – it’s the place where, in summer 1981, riots over the price of bread broke out that were violently suppressed and then covered up. And the way Ms El Moudir decided to bring the past back into the present was a wonderful one – with dolls. 

Her father, Mohamed El Moudir, built not only a miniature (and electrified) reconstruction of their old street in Casablanca, replicating the houses in every detail down to the pictures on the walls, he also built dolls to represent everyone in the neighbourhood. Cinematographer Hatem Nechi films the resulting street scenes (decorated with sparklers, lit with Christmas lights and bubble lamps) as if they were of real people, and these miniatures somehow bring the city to vivid life in a way which images of old photos never quite manage to capture (and of which hardly any exist of this time anyway, as the story makes clear). But the use of the dolls as human stand-ins becomes even more important when one of the neighbours, Abdallah Zouid, uses his doll to re-enact his experience of survival in a cell that was so overcrowded with people arrested for no reason that many of his friends and neighbours suffocated to death. Another neighbour, a twelve-year-old child named Fatima, was shot in the mass riots. Her family managed to drag her body home but the police broke into the house and stole it, and she was lost to them for over thirty years, until a mass grave was discovered. It was so upsetting to the family they can hardly bring themselves to talk about her, meaning her memory was at risk of vanishing, just as she did. 

So this unusual and affecting documentary is an assertion of self, both for the director but also for Morocco itself. It’s a document which reminds the world both that Ms El Moudir exists but also that the people who were murdered by the state existed, that the people whose lives were ruined in the aftermath still exist, and that it is better to tell the truth and remember rather than close the curtains and forget. Its cleverness and attention to detail are a powerful assertion that details matter, that the details of our lives matter, and the best way to honor a lost and missing past is to say its name. 

***Winner: Un Certain Regard Award-Director Prize***