SIFF: The Mother of All Lies [Morocco]

How do you reconstruct the past when all traces of that past have been erased? This is the dilemma that confronts filmmaker Asmae El Moudir, in terms of both her personal history and the history of her country. In terms of her personal history, her tyrannical grandmother has forbidden the taking of photographs in the family, seemingly as part of a larger obfuscation of the past. In the absence of photographs, El Moudir enlists her father, a successful builder, to help her construct an elaborate diorama of the street where the family lived during her childhood, in the Sebata district of Casablanca. She populates the diorama with miniature clay figurines of her family, friends, and neighbors. Their real-life counterparts are then invited to revisit their memories of that time and place—in particular the 1981 Casablanca Bread Riots, protests over the price of bread that were brutally suppressed by the police and military. On El Moudir’s street alone, a girl her age named Fatima was killed in the street; neighbors Saïd and Abdallah were seized and tortured. These events have been suppressed in El Moudir’s family history, as well as in the national history. But El Moudir recreates them, retrieving what might otherwise be lost; bringing family secrets and memories to light, and achieving some measure of justice, if only in miniature.