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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Wicked Little Letters review – a depressing, obvious, clunky waste of a stellar cast

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Any wider comment on the strange, sad nature of the scandal this film is based on is sidestepped in favour of broad laughs and superficiality

Unconvincing, unfunny and bafflingly heavy-handed, this shrill non-comedy fails to say anything entertaining or historically insightful about the true story of the Littlehampton poison-pen scandal of 1923. It’s a terrible waste of a stellar cast, headed by Olivia Colman, although the simple aggregation of everyone’s acting talent does raise the film a bit.

Colman plays Edith Swan, a prim-and-proper spinster in the curtain-twitching world of 1920s Littlehampton, always congratulating herself on her Christian rectitude; she lives with grumpy elderly dad (Timothy Spall) and glowering mum (Gemma Jones). Edith has a problem neighbour with whom she’s fallen out after initial friendship: this is Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley), a woman from Ireland who cheerfully likes drinking and swearing. So when Edith starts getting bizarre, obscene unsigned letters through the letterbox – and then more and more people start getting them, too – Rose is in the frame, the outsider that all these xenophobes dislike anyway. But policewoman Gladys Moss (Anjana Vasan) thinks there’s more to it.

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