Date

Sep 27 2024 - Oct 10 2024
Expired!

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.

SHOWTIMES

SEPT 27 | FRI

5:00 p.m.

SEPT 28 | SAT

2:55, 7:05 p.m.

SEPT 29 | SUN

12:50, 5:00 p.m.

SEPT 30 | MON

7:05 p.m.

OCT 1 | TUE

5:00 p.m.

OCT 2 | WED

7:05 p.m.

OCT 3 | THU

5:00 p.m.

OCT 4 | FRI

5:00, 9:10 p.m. 

OCT 5 | SAT

CLOSED DUE TO HOMEGAME
NO SCREENINGS

OCT 6 | SUN

12:50 p.m.

OCT 7 | MON

5:00, 7:05 p.m.

OCT 8 | TUE

5:00, 7:05 p.m.

OCT 9 | WED

5:00, 7:05 p.m.

OCT 10 | THU

5:00 p.m.
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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Director
Asmae El Moudir
WITH
Zahra Jeddaoui, Mohamed El Moudir, Abdallah EZ Zouid, Said Masrour, Ouardia Zorkani, Asmae El Moudir
Run Time
1 hour, 37 minutes
Released
2023
Distributed by
Outsider Pictures
HEARING AND VISUAL ASSISTANCE

Assisted Listening
Subtitled / Open Captions

Country
Morocco, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Egypt
SUBTITLES
In Arabic with English subtitles
NOT RATED
Many of the films shown at The Ross are not rated due to the prohibitive cost of acquiring a rating from the Motion Picture Association of America. Consequently, as many of these films contain graphic content, viewer discretion is advised.
REVIEWS
“The delicate mix of handmade replicas and oral testimony brilliantly evokes the personal and collective trauma that stem from Morocco’s ‘Years of Lead’ — a period of state brutality under Hassan II’s dictatorial rule.”
Phuong Le

Guardian

“A staggering work of documentary filmmaking, Asmae El Moudir recreates her personal history and a tragic chapter in Morocco’s history with her family as witness.”
Drew Gregory

Autostraddle

“THE MOTHER OF ALL LIES is an astonishing work whose maturity comes from El Moudir’s wide-eyed approach to her family history, where memory and history are quite literally reduced to playthings in order to process the unspeakable events they conjure up.”
Manuel Betancourt

Variety

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