The Mother of All Lies
Written and Directed by Asmae El Moudir
Unrated
Runtime: 97 minutes
In theaters September 6 in New York, September 13 in LA

by Christine Freije, Staff Writer 

The surreal and theatrical new documentary The Mother of All Lies begins with a personal quest for answers: the filmmaker, Asmae El Moudir, wants to know why she was never allowed to see any pictures of herself as a child. Without photographic proof, which of her memories can be trusted? How can she create a document of her past without tangible evidence?

To answer these questions, El Moudir creates a play-world: she enlists her father, Mohamed, to build an intricate and detailed miniature model of their neighborhood in Casablanca, Morocco, complete with figures representing herself, her family, and their neighbors. Throughout the film, she uses this recreation to uncover not only her own history, but that of her parents, her grandparents, her city, and her country. The result is a an expansive, mysterious, and elegantly woven film: a beautiful and disturbing memory collage that oscillates powerfully between the personal and political.

The tragic history that haunts the film is the 1981 Casablanca Bread Riots, in which demonstrations against an increase in the price of flour were met with violent police repression and the secret burial of hundreds of bodies in mass graves. Though this event took place years before the filmmaker was born, El Moudir’s need to uncover the history of the demonstrations feels urgent to her understanding of herself and her family. The streets she grew up playing on were the site of carnage that the government tried to keep buried, and her project is to dig it up.

This conceit leads to several staggering sequences that take place in and around Mohammed’s miniature world. In one, El Moudir recreates the day of the riots, her head hanging over the tiny streets as she orchestrates chaos. In another, the family’s neighbor Abdallah tells the story of his sudden arrest and incarceration. As he begins to tell his story, the camera looks down on him hunched forward over a miniature jail cell. At first, he recounts the events of the day plainly, efficiently manipulating the small figures representing himself, the other prisoners, and the guards. But as he goes on, the traumatic story starts to have a powerful effect on him. As he describes the heat of the jail cell, the steam rising from the floor, he takes off his shirt. He lights a cigarette with shaky hands. It’s painful to watch him relive that day, but by allowing his story to be captured by El Moudir’s camera, he ensures that it won’t be lost to history.

Casting a shadow over this experiment in reclaiming the past is El Moudir’s grandmother, Zahra, a powerful and at times tyrannical figure. Zahra seems to prefer that the past stay buried and tries to bend reality to get her way. In the first scene of the film, El Moudir helps Zahra put on her hearing aids, but when she asks her an uncomfortable question, Zahra pretends she still can’t hear. She refuses to acknowledge that her granddaughter is a filmmaker, insisting instead that she’s a journalist. When she disapproves of the miniature figure that El Moudir and her father created to represent her, El Moudir hires an artist to drawn Zahra’s portrait on a large pane of glass. When the picture is complete, Zahra chases the artist off, brandishing her cane, and smashes the portrait to pieces.

 But despite her resistance, Zahra is the person who seems most moved and changed by El Moudir’s experiment. The film reframes her reticence to explore the past, taking what seems like hardened cruelty and revealing it to be rooted in pain and tragedy. When El Moudir asks Zahra what she saw on the day of the bread riots, she is as hard and evasive as ever. But the camera captures what Zahra won’t admit out loud—in her eyes, you can see the fear and pain that lie beneath her never-ending quest for control.

The Mother of All Lies is a remarkably free film, moving from personal to social history, from subjective memory to objective fact. El Moudir’s lyrical narration, which she whispers like a secret, ties these disparate threads together. At times, this poeticism obscures the fierce, pointed curiosity of the filmmaker’s investigation—it feels languid, rather than driving. But El Moudir’s voice also reminds us of her subjectivity, that what she’s showing us is not objective truth, but a recreation of a hidden past.