A personal history with hand-made dolls as stand-ins

Asmae El Moudir only had one photograph of herself as a kid, and even that was questionable. “My mother insisted that it was me in the photo, but to be honest, I didn’t believe her. At one point, I also wondered why we didn’t have any pictures around the house. My grandmother, a particularly dominant person in the household, hid behind religion and cherished the portrait of the king. I discovered that these had all been lies when a cemetery was rediscovered near our house in 2016. It didn’t take long after that for me to connect the location to the Bread Riots of 1981; protests during which 600 people were killed in one day and many ended up imprisoned.”

“I was born in 1990, nine years after the riots, but the history runs through my life as a red thread and is part of my memory. Several films have been made about the events of 1981, but I wanted to take a different approach. As I say to my grandmother in the film: I am not a journalist, but an artist. I am not out to make accusations, but rather to portray the daily dynamics in a household and beyond. I use the documentary genre as a hybrid form.”

Before El Moudir could broach the subject with her family, she had to move: Away from the old house whose “walls had ears” as her grandmother always said. Meanwhile, the filmmaker was busy creating an archive. And then she had to convince her family to share their story. “I said: I will protect you with my art. But they hesitated for a long time.”

There were also obstacles to face outside of the parental home. “I was not given a permit to film the cemetery, even for one day. That’s how I came up with the idea of asking my father to create a scale model of our old street. He made figurines based on my family and our neighbors. I had no idea how long it would take to make the film, or if everyone would live to see the film completed. By using hand-made figurines, I could guarantee continuity, with dolls as stand-ins.”

In the early days of the production process, a camera was more than El Moudir could wish for—she recorded everything with a collection of microphones. “I was also my own foley artist,” she recounts. “I made a film without video footage, a kind of radio play. Luckily, I had enjoyed a technical study, which meant I could do the audio editing myself. I didn’t trust anyone who spoke Arabic, the material was too sensitive, and I worked on it for two years all on my own. It was like being in a prison.”

For the same reason of security and to avoid possible censorship, El Moudir kept a distance from Moroccan government funds and institutions. “My film was completely independently funded; with money I scraped together left and right. IDFA was extremely important. I went through the entire cycle: IDFAcademy through summer school to IDFA Forum, to the screening at IDFA. This film grew up within IDFA.”

The Mother of All Lies was premiered as part of Un Certain Regard in Cannes, where the film won the L’Oeil d’or prize for Best Documentary and El Moudir was awarded Best Director of Un Certain Regard. Closely followed by awards in Sydney, Valladolid, Bergen, Athens, Durban, and New York. “The international recognition has meant a lot to how the film was received in my own country,” says the filmmaker, who was honored as the first Moroccan main prize winner at Marrakech Film Festival two weeks after IDFA. “My film has now even been selected as the Moroccan entry for the Oscars. This means the past can be spoken about more freely, in a way that was unthinkable only five years ago. My role in this is as provocateur. I don’t provide any solutions, but I do encourage others to explore and find solutions.”

This In the spotlight article was published in the IDFA Bertha Fund Activity Report 2023. Discover the stories and impact of the Fund using the button below.