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 has bagged the top prize at the 70th edition of the Sydney Film Festival. The film received a A$60,000 ($41,100) cash prize.
The film recently premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes where it earned the section’s best director prize.
The jury, an Indian filmmaker headed by Anurag Kashyap, said: “Juxtaposing evidence from barely existent public materials with private family memory, this film reconstructs the history of the state, the family and the individual, in three distinct levels.”
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.
The festival, which ran from June 7-18, will now take to the road. Selections will be shown at seven locations in New South Wales, including Newcastle, Orange, Port Macquarie and Sawtell, as part of the Travelling Film Festival through October 2023.
