Feature Documentary
TOTAL BUDGET
US $234,760
CONFIRMED FINANCING
US $80,000
CONTACT
asmae.elmoudir@gmail.com
+212644169295
A Moroccan woman’s search for truth gets tangled with a web of lies in her family’s history. As a daughter and filmmaker, Asmae fuses personal and national history as she reflects on the 1981 Bread Riots, drawing out connections to contemporary Morocco.
Young Moroccan director Asmae goes to her parents’ place in Casablanca to help them move out. She sorts out all the objects of her childhood, and sees an upsetting photograph: children smiling in a kindergarten playground, and on the edge of the frame, a little girl is sitting on a bench, looking shyly at the camera. This picture is the only image of her childhood.
Convinced that she’s not the child in this picture, Asmae introduces her camera and plays with this intimate incident to make her parents talk about memories that she doesn’t trust either.
This photo, a sensitive subject, becomes the starting point of an investigation during which the director questions all the little lies told by her family: Is her mother telling the truth about the picture? Has her father really built the Lion of Ifrane with his own hands? Does her grandmother tell the truth about Asmae’s job? And why does she prefer to tell everyone that she’s a journalist?
Little by little, Asmae explores the memory of her own people—either real or surreal— together with the memory of her neighborhood and country.
What’s real in this reconstructed story made out of fragmented childhood memories?
As the lies grow bigger, the director discovers something strange; a cemetery not far from their home, and a peculiar story of bodies that disappeared 38 years earlier.
Surrounded by her parents and neighbors, Asmae creates links between her childhood photo and the famous Bread Riot of June 20, 1981.
The shooting of my film follows the construction works that we are making in our new house. By moving out, my parents leave this place filled with stories and lies, embodied by the house and the neighborhood. My film will show this organic mix of walls, doors, and windows, destroyed in one house and built in the other.
I must constantly compensate for the lack of visual archive. This leads me to imagine the reconstruction of our house and our neighborhood in miniatures. My role is to show the difficulty of describing a society that systematically erases its past to better manipulate it. My story is made of memories of the little girl I was and of memories told by my parents and grandmother.
Miniatures will help us connect both threads of the story. They will enable me to tell childhood memories, but also to re-enact the Bread Riots. By giving a voice to one another, even if they will contradict each other, it’s me, this young girl, half child and half adult, that examines the stories that made who I am today.
My voice softly becomes a key element to direct the film and the spectator’s look. My questions and my fantasized memories, stuck between reality and fiction, between truth and lies, show how difficult it is to build one’s identity when all our memories are unreliable.
Objects in the film are not randomly put here and there, but they enable us to solve both familial and national puzzles.
Watching Asmae’s previous short film, Thank God It’s Friday, we were convinced we encountered a unique voice: the writing, the mise-en-scène, the use of archives, the storytelling; all this was showing the director’s talent.
Soon, we realized that her documentary project was following the same objective; thanks to an inventive and delicate staging, it aims to transform her intimate world into a deeply metaphorical and political world. With The Mother of All Lies, Asmae wonders how lies are being built in a family—hers—and in a country—Morocco.
By associating her family stories to the Bread Riots context, Asmae doesn’t want to judge her parents, but she wants to show that little lies that emerge in a family are only the symptomatic reflection of something bigger, anchored in the collective memory of her country.
We were lucky enough to participate in pitching and writing residencies at Pitching du Réel in Nyon, at IDFA Summer School in Amsterdam, and at the Carthage Cinematographic Days in Tunisia. These residencies brought to us useful and precious exterior commentaries, and helped us move forward in the writing and development of the film.
The topic of this film is very sensitive in Morocco, where censorship is still a hot topic. This is why a co-production with France was necessary. We have been working on this project for more than a year now, with a lot of enthusiasm and curiosity for Asmae’s audacious vision and her courage to face these issues.
Asmae El Moudir
2019: Dans le village de ma mère
2015: Light and Shadow
2013: Thank God It’s Friday
2012: The Colors of Silence
Lucie Rego
2019: Intentional Sweat
2019: Insectopedia
2019: Alien TV
2018: Purina N°1
2016: Yatim