Every family has secrets, but when young Moroccan filmmaker Asmae El Moudir agrees to help her parents move out of the Casablanca house they’d lived in throughout her life, she realizes that her family’s mysteries are vast.
Why do her parents have only one picture of Asmae during childhood? And why is she sure the girl in the picture isn’t her? What other stories has her family told that are untrue?
To pry open the lies, El Moudir and her father build a handmade set that recreates their neighborhood. In an atmosphere that balances the surreal and the all-too-real, she brings the whole family to the soundstage where the miniature town is built and begins to ask questions, unraveling the story, letting her family members talk, asking probing questions. Slowly, she begins to interrogate the tales that her mother, father, and grandmother have told all her life about their home and country, starting to understand the layers of deception and intentional forgetting that have shaped her life. She captures their stories — and sometimes the pain and anger that comes with feeling them unearthed — in non-fiction that feels like a dreamscape, treading into a collective subconscious.
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The Mother of All Lies opens in select theaters beginning Sept. 6, 2024.
