The Mother of All Lies (2023) User Reviews

Intriguing documentary about the 1981 Bread Riots and themes of lies, family background, and history

[chenp-54708 · 8/10 · 12 November 2023]

Saw this at the DOC NYC 2023 Film Festival.

The Mother of All Lies premiered at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival where it won the Un Certain Regard for Best Director for director Asmae El Moudir and upon seeing this movie, I can understand why. It's an very intriguing and fascinating examination on the 1981 Bread Riots in Morocco with interesting themes of family background, lies, and ideas of memories explored. Throughout, the movie blends with real life interviews and claymation models to demonstrate the settings and discussions (similar to The Missing Picture) and Moudir provides strong directing on balancing out the two with strong emotions, themes, and great discussions that are interesting and fascinating to listen to.

The camerawork is beautiful and each participant from family members and so forth provide good discussions and insights about the massacre, family backgrounds, and the traumatic experiences. The uses of the clay models felt purposeful and many of the themes and directions from Moudir felt purposeful and not all over the place. The dialogue and emotions are really good and admittedly, there are still some emotional moments and scenes that are still burned into my memory. My own small issue is that certain pacing moments could have been better.

Overall, I can see why it won the award from Cannes and it's a great documentary.

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[babayane · 6/10 · 12 September 2023]

In her film "White Lies", the director tries to draw a picture from her memory to reveal the secrets and worlds of the years of political instability and the political turmoil that accompanied it in the country. The film also reflects the personalities and spirit of the children of the 1990s in Morocco through that image The film is summed up in the end by saying that all the pictures that I browsed About that stage, it disappeared, except for the picture of King Hassan II that remained on the walls. Moroccan director Asmaa says, "For 10 years, I have been researching and collecting documents about that difficult stage, and I wanted that photo to be linked to my photo at school, returning to the difficult stages that the Moroccan street went through.