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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Streaming: the best holiday romance films

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Netflix’s featherweight A Tourist’s Guide to Love follows a familiar arc, but there’s more to fall for in classics from Summertime to The Green Ray

There’s nothing new under the sun in A Tourist’s Guide to Love – though there’s an awful lot of that sun, brightening every postcard shot in this featherweight Netflix romcom, and for viewers starved of warmth after a long, dreary winter, that’s enough of a lure. It follows a familiar arc: reeling from a breakup, a perky travel executive (Rachael Leigh Cook) takes a trip to Vietnam for notional work reasons, only to be swept off her feet by her charming local tour guide (Scott Lý). The film hits every holiday-romance beat you expect, but it hardly needs to shake things up: cinema has a proud and comforting tradition of stories in which a trip somewhere sunny and far away proves just the ticket for a character whose life has hit the skids.

My favourite example of the form – the fine wine to the budget lambrini of A Tourist’s Guide to Love – remains David Lean’s Summertime (oddly available to stream only on the free, ad-supported service Pluto). Its story of a buttoned-up, middle-aged American secretary splurging her savings on a long-desired trip to Venice and finding, with a suave Italian antique dealer, the kind of spontaneous romance she’s never known, is the platonic ideal of the genre: bathed in sunshine and Technicolor, the character blooms before our eyes, but the happy ending is compromised and complex, and richer for it.

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