THE MOTHER OF ALL LIES

KADIB ABYAD

Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt | 2023 | 97 min

Moroccan filmmaker Asmae El Moudir departs from an absence to make a hybrid documentary that is at once a personal portrait and a deadpan inquisition into her country’s recent history. What the film is lacking is only the photographs, forbidden traces that represent but one element of the repressed memory which, as we find out, is deep-rooted and intricate; it involves not only her family, but the entire country. The repressed event is a by-product of the “bread riot” occurred in Casablanca in 1981 as a consequence of widespread social distress. In this work of digging and reconstruction, the film director has appealed to her whole family. However, truth and memory are difficult burdens to extract, therefore she had to resort to a transfer whereby the members do speak in the flesh, but they do so via the inanimate bodies of a diorama, with the latter depicting the entire neighbourhood which saw their lives unfold. A story of dialogues, confrontations, and things unsaid, in which implacable images resurface in a furred language made of voices and gazes. (t.p.)