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 of the Brat Packers

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Two 80s teen dramas, The Breakfast Club and St Elmo’s Fire, made overnight stars of a band of young actors including Molly Ringwald, Demi Moore and Rob Lowe – and Andrew McCarthy, whose new documentary looks back on those years

Depending on your age, Andrew McCarthy’s Brats (Disney+, from 5 July) will either be a cosy nostalgia trip or a window into another era of celebrity. As someone who was two years old at their zenith, I’ve only ever known the Brat Pack as a past buzzword: a gaggle of then-young American actors who became a collective cultural phenomenon before just as quickly dispersing into a very different array of career fortunes. To look back on that now, as McCarthy’s documentary does, is to learn more about 80s-era media and publicity machinery than anything particularly crucial about American cinema.

The Brat Pack was defined in 1985 by a pair of coming-of-age films, The Breakfast Club and St Elmo’s Fire — one about high-schoolers, one about college grads, though made months apart with heavily overlapping casts. Neither has aged especially well except as a time capsule: the former is at least distinguished by the signature snarky snap of John Hughes’s writing and the fizzy pulse of Simple Minds’ Don’t You (Forget About Me), but the wispy soap opera of St Elmo’s Fire (complete with John Parr’s uncool title song) really has only the eager charisma of its ensemble to recommend it today.

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