The Mother of All Lies
A father’s family always has secrets, perhaps the one of ‘The Mother Of All Lies’ director Asmae El Moudir lies in the heart of his mother, this is of obsession and confusion for many periods of her life. As a child in Casablanca, Morocco, she hardly has any childhood pictures. Besides, Moudir learns that she alone in the family possesses a documentary of the family a single photo, and she is not even pretty sure whether the little girl contained in the photograph that her mother handed her around is actually her. Exhausted from searching for information from her evasive parents and relatives, she starts constructing, with her father, a retired builder, a model of the house where she used to live, in order to pose questions that stayed unanswered throughout the family history. The vortex of puzzles and conceals leads to the heiress of the Family chair a strong witted grandmother who hardly ever asked these questions before
This script and family analysis that one can almost describe as storytelling is fun to watch.
Like the construction of her family home, the character in the experiment is also created working together with her father. These people consist of an activist neighbor and a tight lipped grandmother who hated photos and left the young El Moudir with no record of her early years. “When grandmother speaks, their wiliness seems to freeze as if the lifetime photographs were taken and immortalized,” El Moudir explains to the audience in poetic words that follows the film and exudes love and deep admiration. But as the camera whirls and essays the unseen truths and lies, El Moudir’s quest for the picture of her ideal family comes out bare in sweet sorrow. The strives and struggles are captivating as much as the characters are, the matron of the house, fierce lady who looks intimidating even to her kinsfolk. The amount of authority she possesses is unquestionable, what’s amazing is that she is ready to exercise it. If he does not like the way a glass sculpture painted her clay heads she simply storms to the offending piece and bashes it. She then walks over the wreckage of her stated with glee.
But as El Moudir doesn’t have the luxuries of theorists in other documentaries with commentators, she instead employs the dollhouses that her father and her made for the flashing screen and explains the history through a simple concept of screen change focusing on children’s toys.
The effect is playful when small figures of real people and of the artists move around the scene and can be seen behind their works. They are reconstructing history before our very eyes and experience times long gone and stories told so few times yet so familiar.
El Moudir’s interview questions lead into an almost neglected moment of Morocco’s history, the Bread Riots in 1981, that led to various casualties due to an uprising against violence that was met by the military. These events were on the record in the mother’s neighborhood, at the sight of the children’s grandmother. Such events which even today are painful for many in the family’s past, have never been brought up to El Moudir who is born more than an entire generation after the ‘fathers of l’Boulevard’ have come to life and missed the genocide that occurred in the playground her childhood. This is such an event that was a catastrophe for everyone in the country, yet, it is neither taught in schools nor is it customary to bring it up. Similarly, only one image of the relevant period in her father’s case appears, the picture vividly contrasts the suppression of Morocco’s memory about the relevant event with the ardent desire of El Moudir’s father’s grandmother to forget every single attack
Indeed, many corpses remained unrecovered, as the military sought to conceal the awful accident and photographs of family members who had perished left many with enough to gaze.
She causes no discomfort while losing touch with time, combining confessional interviews and doll-like close up pictures of clay figurines in recreated neighborhoods of Song Of Casablanca and its impressive dialect and cadence. El Moudir is able to recreate pain at a new level where rediscovering self and emotions covered for many years becomes a new journey of restoring old and putting lives back in order.
As she emerges from the fixation of her trauma, El Moudir is also gifted her long sought out answers along with perhaps some semblance of respect by her grandmother. El Moudir in building her case for the film manages to make a correlation between how people put objects of themselves in models and the way we build our own personal narratives. The film, in a way, begs to be used as a device that encourages one to ask the difficult questions of their relatives, not to see into the family mysteries only, and risk, perhaps, never knowing the answers in the future for the only way to make sure memories are not lost is to confront the past, not ignore it.
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