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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Jules review – Ben Kingsley helps an alien in likably folksy twist on ET

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As a widower with dementia, no one believes a UFO has crashed in Milton’s back yard or that he’s caring for an extraterrestrial – until his neighbours find out

Screenwriter Gavin Steckler and director Marc Turtletaub have given us this goofy, likable new twist on ET. In the Mathison/Spielberg classic from 1982, the visiting extraterrestrial found safety within the secret world of children, whose existence is beneath the grownups’ notice. Now the space alien finds himself protected by old people, who are used to being patronised and ignored.

Chief among the alien’s allies is Milton, played by Ben Kingsley, an ageing widower in whose back garden his spaceship crash-lands, and who, with instinctive neighbourly kindness, welcomes the mute, hairless naked interplanetary creature into his house. Milton has dementia, and so when he tells locals that he is having to get extra food in for the alien, no one pays much attention other than to relay this apparently sad and upsetting news to Milton’s grownup daughter Denise (played by Zoë Winters, who plays Logan Roy’s assistant and mistress Kerry in TV’s Succession). The scene in which Milton fails the dementia test in the doctor’s office is genuinely sweet and sad due to the fact that it could have taken place in an entirely different, serious film.

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