By Yun-hua Chen.
For the story that I wanted to tell, there were no pictures and no proofs of what happened. I just started with one picture, and I finished with 500 hours of footage. I wanted to tell the story, but how I tell this story should be different.”
Moroccan director, Asmae ElMoudir, already showcased her personal and unique approach to documentaries in her debut film, The Postcard (2020). In that film, she embarks on a journey to Zawia, the village depicted in an old picture postcard found among her mother’s belongings; it’s the village that her mother left as a child, never to return. In her second feature documentary, The Mother of All Lies, which she directed, wrote and produced, ElMoudir delves into the darker past of her family and their street in Sebata district in Casablanca. The narrative germinates from an unsettling reality: there are no photographs in their home. Her grandmother, Zahra, influenced by her religion and scarred by the traumas from the 1980s, prohibits any form of image or photography. ElMoudir retraces her childhood memories, recalling the surreptitious delight of clandestinely having her photo taken against a then-fashionable Hawaiian backdrop at a local studio. As she delves deeper into her family’s intricate history, she uncovers its interwoven threads with the collective history of the neighborhood, particularly its connection to the Bread Uprising in 1984, a tragic event that culminated in a bloody massacre of numerous residents.
To create a safe space for her interviewees and a site for reconstruction of memories, ElMoudir initiates a family-operated atelier, which she calls “laboratory”. Her father Mohamed, an artist earning his livelihood as a successful builder, crafts a scaled model of her childhood neighborhood and miniature clay figurines, whereas her mother sews clothes for these figurines. Their miniature street, reminiscent of a dollhouse, aims to recreate the ambiance and people of that era. Friends, neighbors, and most challengingly, ElMoudir’s grandmother, are subsequently invited to the atelier to interact with the miniatures and reflect upon their past. Grandmother Zahra strongly resists this practice of image-creation, even to the point of destroying the figurine crafted to represent her and shattering the glass upon which a painter attempts to capture her portrait. Stories unravel, such as that of Fatima, a neighborhood girl killed during the Bread Uprising; a neighbor recounts his ordeal of being tortured in prison by the oppressive regime. Meanwhile, conversations among family members can appear confrontational and irreconcilable, yet they eventually serve as a cathartic release for pent-up resentment and anguish across generations. ElMoudir’s unfolding of personal history on that street prompts reflection on the collective history of 1981 Bread Riots, its implications for contemporary Morocco, and the significance of truth. Their individual stories echo a period in national history that has been suppressed and left unspoken of.
Having garnered the Best Director award of Un Certain Regard at Festival de Cannes, ElMoudir made her way to the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. Here, she discusses with Film International the healing process that filmmaking.
When did you start working on the film, and why did you choose to use miniature models as a means to tell the story?
This film took me eight years. I was looking for a positive way to tell this hard story, this intimate story. I had no idea when I would be able to finish this film. There was no archival material at all. For the story that I wanted to tell, there were no pictures and no proofs of what happened. I just started with one picture, and I finished with 500 hours of footage. I wanted to tell the story, but how I tell this story should be different. That’s why I am a filmmaker. In order to find a way, together with my father I created these handmade sets, these miniature models. This was also my father’s idea. He is an artist and creates lots of things with his hands for years and years. He was never known as an artist because he worked to support us and built houses in Casablanca in Morocco. For this film he did real art, and we started thinking about how we could bring the décor to us instead of going to the décor. One of my characters, my grandmother, is 85 years old and cannot move a lot. Also, I cannot obtain the authorization to shoot the film in Morocco. So, the idea was to construct everything that we cannot find in reality and tell the story that way.
Was it difficult to get your family members, friends and neighbors onboard for this project?
It was not easy to work with people you see every day and people whom you live with. For me the hard part was to convince my grandmother to be in the film because she never liked pictures. It took me a long time. I tried to convince her for three years. I threatened to hire an actress to play her role in the film. I brought an actress, showed her to my grandmother and told her that this actress would tell your story because I needed you in this film. And she looked at the actress and said, no, she cannot tell my story; I can do that better than this actress. I thought, great, do it then. It was on the day that she agreed to participate in the film. As She didn’t like camera, she forbade me to come to the house with a camera. She was upset all the time. When I started asking her question, she started looking around, “where is the camera?” As for my parents, they were completely with me. They love me a lot and want to do anything that makes me feel happy. My neighbors are my parents’ friends. The man of the cell, for example, was afraid at the beginning, but I told him that it was about art; we were only talking about our own stories: my story about the picture, your story about the cell, and my grandmother’s story about not liking pictures and why. That’s it. It’s just that our intimate stories correlate to national stories, but we don’t fabricate anything. What is very important for the film is spending time with them, interacting with them and making them understand our mechanism of telling lies in the household, and how these small lies grew, broke the walls of our houses and escaped into the neighborhood and then in the entire country. It was the idea of starting from small things and reaching big things. That’s why in Arabic the title is “White Lies.” It is the white lies that became the mother of all lies.
As you mentioned the title, there are many ways to understand your English title “The Mother of All Lies”…
It is the white lies, but also “the mother of all lies” as an expression, and also the mother as my grandmother.
How was the reconstruction? How long did it take you to recreate the miniature street, and how long did you stay on set?
I started by building my own archive because there was no archive. I started to shoot with my small camera in 2018 and then after 2018 I looked for money to have a big production and bring the DOP onboard. From 2019 to 2020 I was working on the set. The miniature models took us eight months, and then the shooting took three months in what I call the “atelier” or “laboratory”. I was trying out things there. From 2018 to 2021 I was just making the film in the laboratory.
Did you live in the space as well? At some point your grandmother took a nap on set.
We were living next to the building for three months. We stayed in the laboratory from 6 AM to 9 PM, and sometimes from 10 AM to 2 PM. Each day was different. In-between I took one week off without shooting because they started to play around themselves and I started losing control of them, and it was not good. So, I stopped filming and left the laboratory so that they could forget about me and my camera. And then, I came back after one week. I told them what I wanted to do and provoked them with some questions, and my DOP was ready to shoot everything. Sometimes things happened, and sometimes nothing happened. I was the producer too, so it was good for me. If I had another producer, he or she would have never accepted what I was doing. I lost money to pay all the crew members to stay there without doing anything for one week. Everybody was upset and wondered, why we are staying there and why we are waiting for a crazy filmmaker. The crew was bored and there was nothing going on. I told them that everyone was free. If they wanted to leave, they could leave and still get paid. Eventually, I finished the film with my DOP and the assistant of my DOP, and it was a great decision.
Where was the laboratory in relation to where the street really is?
I brought my characters to a place that is three hours away from Casablanca because they felt that talking in Casablanca was dangerous and they could not talk freely in their houses; that was the feeling that I had. So, I told them that I would bring them to a space where we could concentrate. Everybody agreed to be in the film and knew that they were recorded; the camera was literally in their face. I wanted to find a way to bring them out of their houses and to convince them, now you are free, you can just talk about your past, everybody can talk about that today, this is our past. We should be really proud of having this past because it is our past and we cannot change it. It is good to reconcile and to be capable of talking about the past with freedom today.
I represent the new generation of Moroccans. I can say that we have a new Morocco today. It’s not the Morocco of my grandmother, who just hushed everyone. It’s not the Morocco of my parents who were silent and could not talk about anything. I proved that I could present this film with this dark past in Morocco today. That means that things are changing. I have no idea now, but when the film goes to a good film festival in Morocco, they would understand that the walls have no more ears; things are changing, and today this generation is different.
You connect images with the past in a very powerful way. Did your grandmother change the way she viewed images through seeing your images?
It was a good therapy for them because I spent a lot of time with them. My grandmother watched the film for the first time in a movie theatre when the film premiered in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard, at the Debussy Theatre. It was her first time leaving Morocco, and it was for watching her own story in a big theatre with all these people; it was a sold-out screening. It was something bigger for me and for her. It was a therapy for her to understand that making pictures doesn’t hurt anybody, and she understands that she was wrong for forbidding pictures in the house. There weren’t any pictures in our home, not even photos from the wedding of my parents, for my siblings, or for anybody in the house. I think this way of making the film is therapeutic for her and every family member. The relationship between my family and me changed after Cannes.
How did she like seeing herself on the screen?
I was super afraid because it was the first time she watched the film. I think after the screening she was super happy to have watched herself on screen. People came to her and paid respect to her as if she were a star, and she asked me, Am I a minister? Why did people come to me like that? It was super interesting and surprising for her. When I received the prize of Best Director in Cannes, I said, let me tell my grandmother in Arabic that I am a filmmaker, with a diploma from Cannes.
Your grandmother had a very unexpected moment of shattering the glass, on which a painter drew her portrait, with her walking stick. How was this shot?
I was not expecting it either. I thought that my grandmother would never break this glass. I called an artist to come and draw my grandmother. I told him that my grandmother is a dictator. I knew that he would draw her differently because of what I said. I provoked her in a way, but I did not expect her to really break the glass. I was just telling my DOP to stop the sequence when she started hitting the artist. But then my DOP didn’t want to stop it. My grandmother started doing something, and then she broke it. I thought it was a big moment. I never understood to what extent she was aggressive with images.
There seems to be a lot of buried things between your parents and grandmother too. Did they reach a better understanding after the film?
They watched the film at Cannes, the red carpet, and then it made them proud of their dark stories. It was also not really a bad story for us because no one in my family died during the riot. And now we can talk about this film, the experience of the premiere at Cannes, and the prize in Sydney. Through the film we changed the view about the bad past and could talk about these new memories from film festivals, which make us happy; those happy memories happened because of the difficult past. If today people talk about this film and our stories, it is thanks to this dark past. So, we tried to transform these bad things into something positive.
This film feels like a tribute to your street, especially when you put the miniature street on the original street in Casablanca towards the end of the film…
I brought the miniature from the laboratory and put it on the real street. The miniature street is still here with me. In my next film I will start with it. It will be the starting point. It will be a fiction film. I have a trilogy plan with “the mother of all lies” being the link.
You brought out the issue that there was no archive and no record for the incident. Do you think there will be a change after the success of this film?
I think the new generation now, if they have no idea about the bread riot, they can just watch The Mother of All Lies because it can give an idea about how important an archive is for preserving the past. No matter whether the past is dark or not, we should have this archive. When we erase our memories, it is hard for us to recreate. It took me ten years to just understand what happened. I was not looking for who was guilty, and I was not looking to denounce anyone, but I just tried to understand it, given that we did not have anything concrete to demonstrate what really happened. That’s why I took all this time, created the miniature, and told the story. I only changed the way of how the story was told but didn’t change any facts. Today everything is on YouTube, lots of images, but they don’t have any value. We can start from one picture and do something that has value. That is important. Today we ask Google to tell us how to go back to our house; before, there was some creation and imagination. That’s why I made this film as my 12-year-old self when I had no internet. The imagination of the film came from this part of me. With YouTube and Google, we cannot make distinction between what is important and what is not. Everything just comes to us, and there is no room for imagination.
Yun-hua Chen is an independent film scholar. Her work has been published in Film International, Journal of Chinese Cinema, and Directory of World Cinema. Her monograph on mosaic space and mosaic auteurs was published by Neofelis Verlag, and she has contributed to the edited volume Greek Film Noir (Edinburgh University Press, 2022).