The Mother of All Lies

This documentary works with an interesting concept in which the director brings her relatives and former neighbours into one room in order to recollect the past of their families and their street, especially in the context of the massacre of civilians in Morocco at the beginning of 1980s, which was carried out in response to demonstrations against rising bread prices. The powerful personal accounts are accompanied by illustrative shots taken in a detailed cardboard model of the street and the surrounding area with all of the houses and the people who lived there at the time, each of whom is represented by a clay figurine in the model. The search for the truth opens up old wounds, but the confrontation between the residents of one house (particularly in relation to the strict, despotic grandmother whose rules everyone had to follow) apparently didn’t lead to as much friction as the director had perhaps hoped for during filming. The recollections of the past are thus interspersed with more mundane shots of a birthday party and the director’s mother singing. The initial promise of a glimpse beneath the veil of lies that the uncompromising and feared matriarch had built up over the years thus remains unfulfilled, as it is not even clear what the substance of her lies was supposed to be. (07/07/2023)