Recently shown at the Cannes International Film Festival, director Asmae El Moudir’s The Mother of All Lies brilliantly and heartbreakingly explores tragic events from before her birth, hidden from her by her family for years. Asmae is at the centre of the film as a guiding force, helping her father build a full miniature replica of their Casablanca neighbourhood that went through years of political repression and violence during the rule of Hassan II.
Asmae isn’t the film’s most important subject though, she’s more of a therapist almost, coaxing her family into telling the truth in unconventional ways. Asmae’s grandmother is the brutal, controlling matriach which the film and the family revolve around. If this were a regular movie, not a documentary about tragic real life events, you’d call the grandmother a breakout star. She’s terrifying and frail, scary but cute. Her meanness is unrelenting, but she’s made likeable through moments of tenderness like Asmae helping her with her hearing aid, Asmae’s mother braiding her hair, and Asmae’s father saying as simply as possible that he loves her, she is his mother. The mean grandma also delivers hilarious lines like complaining that her figurine is deformed or when looking at the walls in a replica of her old apartment: “[my lounge] was royal blue, not this shitty colour.”
Knowing that she herself has lost someone helps the audience to love her as well, or at least be forgiving of her. Also knowing that she must have been coaxed into some of her cruelty for entertainment value, like when she takes a hammer to a glass portrait of herself in front of the artist who drew it.
The figurines look very crude at first when Asmae tells a story of herself as a kid escaping the apartment to get a photo taken of herself. But when we first see the figurines of adults they look much more true to life, as though something about childhood can’t be captured by them. We learn later on that after the massacres, people weren’t allowed to retrieve the dead bodies of their loved ones to bury them. So here they are recreated in miniature.
Two others from the neighbourhood join the recreation: Saïd who participated directly in protests against the government, and Abdallah who got swept up by the police despite trying to not be involved. We see Saïd speaking at a protest. The bright sun is above him, the camera is angled up at him, it looks like its light is coming from his mouth.
In maybe the most intense scene of the movie, the now much older Abdallah shirtlessly recounts being crammed into a small cell with other prisoners. He hovers over a diorama of the cell while a lamp straight out of an interrogation room swings above him. The police didn’t kill him and neither did cigarettes. He’s alone at first. Until the swinging light reveals the others have been watching, and it seems to hover over the grandma for a moment. She seems unmoved though.
Asmae’s father is a steady hand throughout, just calmly making miniature after miniature. He never gets mad. His only emotion is saying he loves his mother near the end. There’s so much emotion in this movie but it doesn’t feel like a tear is shed or that much anger is expressed. The most angry moment, Abdallah leaves out of frustration with grandma, but they still move so slowly to chase after him and calm him down.
They’ve been robbed of a way to speak for decades and a way to remember. Only one photo of the massacre exists today. They’ve been robbed of a way to grieve with no bodies to lay to rest. This documentary and its unconventional way of telling its story feels like the only way to begin tackling the impossible task of knowing the past.
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