The Mother of All Lies

Asmae El Moudir's 2024 Moroccan documentary begins with a single photograph from her childhood. The director suspects the girl in it is not her, and when she asks her family no two accounts agree. The method is to build a model. El Moudir's father reconstructs their Casablanca neighbourhood in miniature; family members act out scenes with figurines standing in for themselves, and the narrative proceeds inside that model rather than in the real place. The real matter is the uprising of 1981 and the deaths that followed. The family kept silent about it for years; the documentary asks why, and the grandmother's resistance moves to the centre of the narrative. Who it's for: those who like formally inventive documentary and North African cinema. Who it's not for: viewers expecting direct historical narration; the film gives the events indirectly, through family memory.