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 Shrouds review – David Cronenberg gets wrapped up in grief

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Cannes film festival
Elaborate necrophiliac meditation on loss and longing stars Vincent Cassel as an oncologist who has founded a restaurant with a hi-tech cemetery attached

David Cronenberg’s new film is a contorted sphinx without a secret, an eroticised necrophiliac meditation on grief, longing and loss that returns this director to his now very familiar Ballardian fetishes. It’s intriguing and exhausting: a quasi-murder mystery and doppelganger sex drama combined with a sci-fi conspiracy thriller which comes very close to participating in that very xenophobia it purports to satirise. And among its exasperating plot convolutions, there is a centrally important oncologist who was having a possible affair with the hero’s dead wife and who had also been her first sexual partner as a teenager – but who never appears on camera.

Yet for all this, the film has its own creepy, enveloping mausoleum atmosphere of disquiet, helped by the jarring electronic score by Howard Shore. We are in Toronto of the present or near future in which a wealthy and stylish widower and entrepreneur called Karsh (Vincent Cassel) has founded a restaurant with a cemetery attached: a state of the art burial place where people can bury their loved ones with a new “shroud” whose thousands of tiny cameras can record and transmit real time, 8K pictures of the body’s decay, which you can watch on your smartphone.

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