CPH:DOX 2024: The Mother of All Lies (by Asmae El Moudir) | Review
Moroccan director Asmae El Moudir employs stop motion puppets to explore missing childhood memories in her feature directorial debut The Mother of All Lies, which won the Un Certain Regard Directing Prize at Cannes 2023. The film screened at CPH:DOX 2024.
The Mother of Lies is not a documentary, it’s a living document of an artist attempting to reconcile with a missing childhood. El Moudir’s grandmother has been the head of the family as far back as she can remember. In her household her grandmother always had one rule—no photos—but despite this, a love for filmmaking flourished. The film is an attempt to put pieces together from decades of undocumented family memories, and to reveal the truth behind her grandmother’s “no photos” rule.
The documentary is set off by a lie: for all of her life, Asmae El Moudir was told only a single photo from her childhood exists. However, the girl in the photo does not look like her: from this point of intrigue the movie takes on sprawling subject matter, spanning from El Moudir’s childhood to her family history, and how this intersects with the history of her country.
Because no archival footage exists, the movie creatively uses stop motion puppets and miniature sets of El Moudir’s home and neighborhood in Casablanca, which were created with the help of her own father. The puppets are used when El Moudir is recalling accounts from her or her family members’ lives, and they lend these scenes a fantastical quality: these retellings are no longer concerned with accuracy, but play out in the distorted way memories often do.
One of the film’s first moments is among its most poignant: El Moudir recounts an early memory where as a child, she snuck out at night to get her photo taken. She sneaks past her mother and father and takes a long walk through the streets of Casablanca—recreated with painstaking detail—to a photo booth popular for newlyweds. The earliest proof of her existence, as she details, is a polaroid in front of a fake Hawaiian backdrop.
Soon enough the narrative shifts away from a personal search for childhood memories and begins to trace the lives of other family members, notably against the backdrop of the 1981 Casablanca bread riots. Here the puppetry begins to serve a dual purpose: for El Moudir’s father, they are not only recreations of unrecorded memories, but a barrier between himself and memories from a violent time for his country that are too painful to convey literally.
The documentary also starts to resemble an investigation into her enigmatic grandmother, and here we get more questions than answers. She hardly ever talks about her past, has a history of telling lies, and the rest of the family regards her with simultaneous love and fear. The filming of the documentary itself even poses questions: if her grandmother is so skeptical of cameras, why would she portray herself in the movie?
Though the film presents a mystery to be solved, The Mother of Lies is not concerned with the truth at all. Beyond a documentary, the movie is a creative exploration of the fallibility of memory, one for which the audience and filmmaker know just as little. As the story of El Moudir’s family history is unraveled, we are taken through a maze of deceit without necessarily being led to a satisfying exit. The result is one of the most interesting autobiographical films in recent memory, even if it never finds that perfect moment of understanding that most documentaries reach—as then again, life rarely does.
CPH:DOX took place from March 13th to 24th, 2024 in Copenhagen, where standout films such as Once Upon A Time in A Forest, The Labour of Pain and Joy, Union, and The Recovery Channel caught our attention.
