The film explores a 1981 massacre in Casablanca through interviews and interactions with the director’s family and former neighbours.
Moroccan filmmaker Asmae El Moudir’s The Mother Of All Lies won the Best Documentary Film award at the Durban International Film Festival 2023, which return to Suncoast CineCentre after a three-year hiatus due to the national lockdown.
The film recently premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes where it earned the section’s best director prize.
In The Mother of All Lies, El Moudir explores her family’s history and the stories and lies told surrounding the upheaval and violence of the 1981 Bread Riots in Casablanca. With no archive footage or even photographs, to draw on, she painstakingly recreates, from memory, her family’s old apartment and the old Casablanca neighbourhood in the form of a miniature set on a soundstage, with figurines to represent her family members.
