THE MOTHER OF ALL LIES

On a handmade set recreating her Casablanca neighborhood, a young Moroccan filmmaker enlists family and friends to help solve the troubling mysteries of her childhood.

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SYNOPSIS

Every family has secrets. But when young Moroccan filmmaker Asmae El Moudir agrees to help her parents move out of the Casablanca house they’d lived in throughout her life, she realizes that her family’s mysteries are vast. Why do her parents have only one picture of Asmae during childhood? And why is she certain that the girl in the picture isn’t her at all? What other stories her family has told are untrue?

To pry open the lies, El Moudir and her father build a handmade set that recreates their neighborhood. In an atmosphere that balances the surreal and the all-too-real, she brings the whole family to the soundstage where the miniature town is built and begins to ask questions, unraveling the story, letting her family members talk, asking probing questions. Slowly, she begins to interrogate the tales that her mother, father and grandmother have told all her life about their home and their country, starting to understand the layers of deception and intentional forgetting that have shaped her life. She captures their stories — and sometimes the pain and anger that comes with feeling them unearthed — in nonfiction that feels like a dreamscape, treading into a collective subconscious.

Ultimately, El Moudir confronts the fact that her grandmother, the family’s matriarch, is the reason so many dark facts and painful memories have been buried in the past. She’s the personification, in a sense, of her whole country. The reality of the past is buried beneath their feet, embedded in the walls, layered into the buildings and places. Truth is hard to face; only by dipping into the emotional texture of the lies can El Moudir start to draw what’s real to the surface.

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