This fascinating non-fiction film — winner of the Best Director prize in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes — unearths powerful revelations after decades of silence, denial and deceit. As her parents and her formidable grandmother prepare to leave the Casablanca home they have lived in for decades, filmmaker Asmae El Moudir takes the opportunity to probe the past. She’s never understood why her mother only has one photograph of her daughter, for instance; in fact she’s not even convinced the girl in the photo is really her. Constructing a scaled reproduction of the street she remembers from her childhood in a film studio with the help of her father (a builder), El Moudir interrogates family and neighbours not only about the mysterious gaps in her own story, but the gaping silence around the 1981 Bread Riot massacre in which hundreds of civilians were killed — including Fatima, a child much like Asmae, who lived on the same block.
Best Director, Un Certain Regard; Golden Eye Best Documentary Award, Cannes 2023
A sly, often playful but ultimately moving study of community, generational anguish and atrocities covered up by the state that blends documentary technique with originality and polished storytelling skill.
Leslie Felperin, The Hollywood Reporter
Community Partner
Morocco/Qatar/Saudi Arabia/Egypt
2023
In Moroccan Arabic with English subtitles
Indigenous & Community Access
Credits
Producer
Asmae El Moudir
Screenwriter
Asmae El Moudir
Cinematography
Hatem Nechi
Editor
Asmae El Moudir
Production Design
Mohamed El Moudir
Original Music
Nass El Ghiwane
Director
Asmae El Moudir
Asmae El Moudir (born in 1990 in Salé) is a Moroccan film director, screenwriter and producer. Asmae has directed documentaries for SNRT, Al Jazeera Documentary, BBC and Al Araby TV. After making a number of short films, Asmae completed the mid-length documentary The Postcard in 2020. The Mother of all Lies is her first feature film.
Spectrum
See more films in this series:
The Mother of All Lies
As her parents and grandmother prepare to leave the Casablanca home they have lived in for decades, Asmae El Moudir takes the opportunity to probe the past, unraveling repressed truths buried within her own family and Moroccan political history.
Orlando, My Political Biography
Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, the transgressive novel is used as a framework to investigate the very real contemporary struggles of trans and non-binary people. Winner of the Teddy Award and Encounters Jury Prize at Berlin Film Festival.
Between Revolutions
In a hybrid film comprised entirely of archival footage, two fictional women are torn from each other by the tides of repressive political and patriarchal systems. A haunting, lyrical tale of longing for freedom amongst connection.
Mighty Afrin: In the Time of Floods
From the floodplains of Brahmaputra River to Bangladesh’s capital city, this stunning hybrid-documentary captures the catastrophic effects of climate change upon the country’s people and landscape. Told through an orphan's personal odyssey.
The Tuba Thieves
Drawing on her experience as a d/Deaf/Hard of Hearing person, director Alison O’Daniel transcends assumptions of sound, silence, and language in this groundbreaking hybrid doc framed around a string of unsolved tuba thefts in L.A.
Hello Dankness
In the finest tradition of MAD Magazine, found footage from classic US film and television is combined to create a fictitious American neighborhood, reflecting modern American life from 2016 - 2021 in a wildly unconventional and absurdist satire.
Asog
Jaya, a teacher and comedian, travels across the typhoon-ravaged Philippines in a bid to win a beauty pageant. En route, they pick up an unlikely companion. Comic, sorrowful, and political, Asog examines the climate crisis through a kaleidoscopic lens.
Smoke Sauna Sisterhood
Within the confines of a smoke sauna deep in an Estonian forest, groups of women gather to cleanse themselves in both body and soul, sharing in traditional sauna-based rituals, while also revealing their hurts and longings, joys and pains.
Kim's Video
New York institution Kim’s Video closed its doors in 2008. Fifteen years later, filmmakers David Redmon and Ashley Sabin set out to find out what happened to the 55,000 film collection and uncover a story of corruption, deception, and intrigue.