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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The Drivers Seat (AKA Identikit) review Elizabeth Taylor captivates in bizarre 70s mystery

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Taylor is both hammy and subtle as a woman on the verge of a breakdown in this preposterous but watchable 1974 drama that features an extraordinary cameo from Andy Warhol

It’s peak 70s Liz Taylor in this arrestingly bizarre movie directed by Italian film-maker Giuseppe Patroni Griffi in 1974, which he co-adapted from the 1970 novella by Muriel Spark and was released under the title Identikit in the US. With her big sunglasses and permanently dishevelled jet-black hair, Taylor gives an intense and more-than-slightly alarming performance in a preposterous, slightly dated yet very watchable psycho-existential mystery, a cousin to the era’s paranoid thrillers. It was shot by Vittorio Storaro, who repeatedly directs light sources into the camera so that the figures often move like shadows behind a disconcerting glow, which is part of the film’s distinctive puzzle.

Taylor plays Lise, a single woman of a certain age who is clearly on the verge of a breakdown. Lise lives in Hamburg, where she is seen buying oddly garish, multicoloured clothes in a department store, high-handedly terrorising the sales assistants and announcing that these garments are appropriate for the warm, southern climes to which she says she is heading. We first see Lise drifting through a surreal department filled with naked mannequins; perhaps The Driver’s Seat has been an influence on Peter Strickland.

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