Saturday, November 9, 2024

Movie Review: ‘The Mother of All Lies’ Shows How Memories Challenge Generational Trauma


Director: Asmae El Moudir
Writer: Asmae El Moudir
Stars: Asmae El Moudir, Mohamed El Moudir, Zahra Jeddaoui

Synopsis: A Moroccan woman’s search for truth tangles with a web of lies in her family history. As a daughter and filmmaker, she fuses personal and national history as she reflects on the 1981 Bread Riots, drawing out connections to modern Morocco.


Hybrid documentary filmmaking has become a genre in its own right. As precisely described by female director Zia Anger in a previous interview as autofiction, the genre recreates reality, painting it in a different light than it already is. The Mother of All Lies is a film about silence, but it is also about photographs as mute witnesses to atrocities.

Moroccan filmmaker Asmae El Moudir recreates the Casablanca neighborhood her family raised her in, through a handmade set. But it seems as if she is recreating her memories, her life, and her identity. Through the powerful tool, a camera, El Moudir unveils generational traumas, a history the adults have tried to erase to carve the way for the future generations. She mixes the personal with the general in an artistic, Eastern setting.

The Mother of All Lies' Review: An Inspired Moroccan Documentary

In this hybrid documentary, El Moudir questions the lack of childhood photos, wonders, and fights with her mother for not finding any picture of her “child” self. Only one vague photo that El Moudir denies any resemblance to exists, and as she recreates the neighborhood and, with it, weaves the memories of events that happened years ago, with an entire generation of witnesses forced into silence.

El Moudir understands what it’s like to be the one who got away. She understands the impact of generational trauma, but because of the generational and cultural gap between her and her family, she also knows that whatever is swept under the rug, can never go away. By connecting with her father and building miniature replicas of what has been, El Moudir reimagines an archival history that a rather oppressive presence has obliterated. Bravery has nothing to do with lives lost and homes confiscated. El Moudir’s story is both heartbreaking and eye-opening, but it is filled with truth.

This is a scary film. It seeps under the skin. The beauty of what is happening on the screen contradicts a violent, horrifying past. Thousands of corpses erased, bodies hidden, a cemetery dedicated to the souls of the 1981 Bread Riots’ victims. The idea of history erasure, of dispensable human life, not only terrorizes but haunts. El Moudir’s grandmother’s refusal to keep any picture of the family not only hints at the state of absence but denies the existence.

El Moudir’s documentary dawns on the viewer, slowly dragging them to its grim reality. It doesn’t fall at once, which is a testament to this young Moroccan director’s brilliance, but hits in particular sensitive spots, leaving the viewer in a trance state, only to awake when credits roll.

When archiving a documentary for the Western world, things are different. Everything is in its place. Victims and horrors are documented. Everything is archived for a younger, less battered generation to dig deep and uncover. But in other far lands, history does not exist. Because existence is a memory archived and documented, the power of the photograph is smeared with the power of destruction. 

The Mother of All Lies is a swan song, sorrowful but inevitable. It crushes the soul but does so in an aesthetic environment of beauty. Morbid events unfold through a thread of beautification on screen. Similar to Rear Window, El Moudir creates a voyeuristic nightmare for oblivious onlookers, but instead of witnessing a simple murder, voyeurs are witnessing a massacre, committed on a nationwide level. The unspoken Moroccan history is front and center, leading the narrative with the bodies of the ones gone, and the ones present, creating a set of buildings, a neighborhood, and a life of clustered events.

Grade: A

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