A Moroccan woman's search for truth tangles with a web of lies in her family history. As a daughter and filmmaker, she fuses personal and national history as she reflects on the 1981 Bread Riots, drawing out connections to modern Morocco.
The Mother of All Lies is the International Feature submission for Morocco. The film is about Asmae, and her family, her friends, her neighbours and her experiences growing up in Casablanca under a strict household. Using a scale model of her childhood neighbourhood and little figurines to represent all the characters in her film, this moving documentary explores the tragedies of the 1981 Bread Riots and the aftermath that it had with the entire family.
Asmae’s entire family lived with her grandma, Zahra, a grandma that everyone was scared of due to her strictness and rigidity. When her grandmother spoke, everyone froze in fear, just like in the photos. Due to the Bread Riots that occurred in 1981 and a personal tragedy that occurred to Zahra as a young mother, she forbade any pictures from ever being taken, which included no pictures being allowed in the house.
One of the pivotal moments in the neighbourhood was the Bread Riots in 1981. Citizens, especially from impoverished neighbourhoods, held a strike to protest the increase in food prices, especially with bread. What happened though was a complete massacre as police and military units fired into the crowds, resulting in the deaths of around 600 people. Some of the dead were from the same neighbourhood as Asmae, including an innocent girl named Fatima, who was 12 years old.
To add on top of it, a personal tragedy that occurred to Zahra as a young mother, involving a photograph, is the reason why she is as strict and emotionally hurt when it comes to pictures. The problem is that Asmae, up to the age of 12, never had a photograph taken of herself. While it can be said that this generation takes too many pictures of themselves, there’s something to be said about having precious moments accessible as a reference for later on. It’s proof that they existed. It can be difficult to build an identity, when one’s memories become unreliable. If someone doesn’t have any visual references as a child, as a teenager, as a parent, how can someone remember the past, if one’s memory isn’t trustworthy anymore?
Asmae's documentary though is about opening up and about sharing one's experiences from the past, to express and let go of personal tragedies in order to move forward. People don’t measure how much silence hurts until the day they speak. They realize that the best way to understand what happened, was to dig deep inside themselves, and to uncover the mother of all lies.