The Mother of All Lies review – pursuing the truth of Morocco’s brutal dictatorship years

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Asmae El Moudir employs a delicate mix of handmade replicas and oral testimony to brilliantly evoke personal and collective trauma Between those who refuse to remember and those who struggle to forget, a tumultuous clash of minds occupies the centre of Asmae El Moudir’s inventive documentary, a prize-winner at last year’s Cannes film festival. Through a constellation of clay figurines and dollhouse-style miniature sets, most of which were constructed by El Moudir’s father, the director recreates her oppressive childhood in the Sebata district of Casablanca. Under the watchful eyes of her domineering grandmother Zahra, all personal photos are banished from the house, save for a picture of King Hassan II. The delicate mix of handmade replicas and oral testimony brilliantly evokes the personal and collective trauma that stem from Morocco’s “Years of Lead” – a period of state brutality under Hassan II’s dictatorial rule. Lingering on the nimble fingers of El Moudir’s father as he puts t
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Subject review – exploitation, trauma and the ethics of documentary-making

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The subjects of The Staircase, Hoop Dreams, Capturing the Friedmans and others contribute to this thoughtful film about the duty of care film-makers owe those whose stories they tell

If you’ve seen the sensational true crime documentary series The Staircase, you’ll know the story. In 2001, after Kathleen Peterson was found dead at the bottom of the stairs at her home in North Carolina, police suspicion turned to her novelist husband Michael Peterson. When he allowed a documentary team to film what happened next, Peterson said it was because he was worried about getting a fair trial. His adopted daughter, Margaret Ratliff, 20 at the time, grief-stricken and terrified that her dad could be facing the death penalty, agreed to be part of the film. The loss of her privacy in the years since has been devastating, she admits now. “I can’t tell you how painful it is, reliving my mum’s death over and over again.”

This super-thoughtful and sensitive documentary also interviews the “stars” of other well-known documentaries. Arthur Agee was a 14-year-old basketball prodigy from a tough neighbourhood in Chicago when film-makers arrived to shoot Hoop Dreams. Jesse Friedman spent 13 years in jail after he and his father Arnold pleaded guilty in 1998 to sexually abusing children – a conviction put into doubt by the 2003 film Capturing the Friedmans. Mukunda Angulo was raised in a New York apartment isolated from the world by his controlling dad, as detailed in The Wolfpack.

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