(IMAGE: Outsider Pictures)
Outsider Pictures. 2024. Documentary. 96 minutes.
Grade 5 out of 5
A remarkable reimagining of the very grammar of the documentary film, Asmae El Moudir’s The Mother of All Lies takes a forgotten/repressed political massacre in Moudir’s native Morocco and blends it with her own family’s addiction to evasion and secrecy to bring the old feminist adage that “the personal is political” to fascinating life. Moudir grew up in a home tyrannized by an authoritarian grandmother, who burned all the family photos and erased El Moudir’s entire past for reasons that are obscure to the filmmaker. Grandma is fascinating in the four-dimensional way a Shakespearean villain might be — she listens against walls, spies out of windows, and gestures for silence any time El Moudir asks a penetrating question about the family history — intricate behaviors, suggesting a buried backstory of trauma and loss.
In a real sense, grandma has both dominated and blighted the lives of everyone El Moudir cares about — her father, who still thinks of the bitter but animated old crone as the mother he adores, and her mother, who married into domestic difficulty, and quietly resents her husband as a result. To externalize the family’s trauma in the hope of examining it fully, El Moudir convinces her father to help her build a charmingly realized scale model of the street in Casablanca where she spent her childhood living in trepidation within her grandmother’s home. The past father and daughter build together is initially festive and picturesque, populated by charming effigies of Asmae, her kin, their neighbors, and the joyful Moroccan bands who fill El Moudir’s memories with music and light. But slowly, as El Moudir explores her own family trauma by asking her friends and family to do so, El Moudir starts to understand how all the people she’s filming are living scarred lives, blighted by the long shadow of a political tragedy, and by unprocessed personal loss.
Shot almost entirely inside the atelier (or “laboratory”) where El Moudir has brought together her family and friends, The Mother of All Lies plays almost as a kind of arthouse reality show, but one raised to the level of primal truth. As her camera snakes its way up and down cardboard streets populated by dolls, El Moudir goes out of her way to show how her film is a fully constructed world — a metatextual space where her friends and family can feel safe to talk. The result is a kind of enforced experiment, designed to draw the El Moudir family’s hidden selves to the surface by giving them toys to contemplate that resemble their own lives. A centerpiece of the film comes when family friend Abdullah — a gentle but tormented man Asmae has been warned away from as “odd” since childhood — abreacts in a long scene where he utilizes the dollhouse world Asmae and her father have constructed to re-enact the source of his psychological misery: his near smothering in an overcrowded jail cell in the aftermath of the Moroccan bread riots of 1981, and his memory of the bodies of his neighbors, stacked in the prison yard like sheep in a butcher shop. In the room watching him perform his tortured pantomime of survivor guilt are Asmae’s cameras and Asmae’s family, and we suddenly realize by the stricken look on grandmother’s face that the fear of the world Asmae and her kin have lived with descends to them from this horrifying source. The documentary wall has been shattered by the immediacy of the moment — Asmae is no longer chronicling the past, because its resolution is happening in the present tense, right before our eyes.
A stunning film that resonates long after it’s over.
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