"The Mother of All Lies" is a documentary film written and directed by young Moroccan filmmaker Asmae El Moudir. Presented in the Un Certain Regard selection at the Cannes Film Festival, the film explores the mysteries and lies surrounding Asmae's childhood, winning the Prix de la Mise en Scène.
The film begins when Asmae goes to her parents' house in Casablanca to help them move. While sorting through her old belongings, she discovers a photo of smiling children in the playground of a nursery school. Almost out of frame, a little girl sitting on a bench looks shyly at the camera. Asmae is convinced that she is not the child in the picture, the only childhood memory her mother has been able to pass on to her.
Determined to solve this mystery, Asmae introduces her camera and starts questioning her parents, playing with this intimate incident to evoke other memories she doesn't believe in either. The photo becomes the starting point for an investigation in which the director questions all the little lies her family told her.
Over the course of the documentary, Asmae explores the memory of her neighborhood and her country, Morocco, seeking to understand why these lies were told and what they reveal about her family and her culture. And as with"Les Filles d'Olfa", in competition, this documentary adopts a unique form, which took the director ten years to perfect. And since it's about reconstructing past events where visual archives don't exist, the filmmaker decides to use miniatures, representing her family and her neighborhood, a brilliant idea that makes the film a wonderful surprise.
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