The Mother of All Lies may wear out its central conceit, but this enchanting documentary film blurs truth and fiction in unique and surprising ways.
Director: Asmae El Moudir
Genre: Drama, Thriller, Documentary
Run Time: 97′
US Release: September 6-13, 2024
UK Release: TBA
Where to watch: in select US theaters
Documentaries often seek to present or uncover the truth. They place real people in front of a camera to tell their stories, or film important events with an objective lens. But every once and a while, a bold filmmaker comes along to mess with our perceptions of the truth. With The Mother of All Lies (Kadib Abyad), Asmae El Moudir stares down the trauma of her family tree while sowing doubt as to whether she is acting as a journalist or a filmmaker.
Moudir’s film is an incredibly personal one. The Moroccan director seeks the help of her family members to uncover complicated memories she recalls from childhood. She especially reflects on her relationship with the family matriarch, her grandmother Zahra, Zahra’s strict forbidding of photos, and the family’s connection to a massacre that devastated her family’s hometown in the early 1980s. Rather than relying on talking heads or some of the other typical documentary cliches, Moudir builds a miniature set of her childhood town with her father, and asks people to use the set, complete with clay figurines of key characters, to tell stories about their lives.
The creation of this miniature set is the centerpiece of The Mother of All Lies. The family members’ interactions with the set evoke some of the film’s most emotional moments, while also giving Moudir to show off her directing prowess. She frames each individual uniquely while they interact with the set, allowing for some striking shot compositions. A particular favorite of mine is a shot of Zahra through a door from one of the miniature’s houses. These shots and framing techniques enhance the movie’s key theme: that even small family stories can carry big emotions. And while an argument could be made that Moudir relies too heavily on this conceit to tell her story, there is no doubt that it leads to some visually satisfying and emotionally resonant scenes.
Moudir also utilizes some filmmaking tricks to enhance the tone, tricks that feel pulled out of an arthouse narrative, further setting The Mother of All Lies apart from other docs. The use of color and lighting are particularly effective. A scene where an overhead light twirls chaotically above the recreated town highlights the confusion the film itself is producing in its audience. While it may sound like it is attempting to reveal objective truth about a certain family, The Mother of All Lies quickly blurs the line between truth, fiction, and falsehood. When Zahra sees her miniature figurine for the first time, she decries it for being “deformed.” Much in the same way, the movie messes with and deforms the past, reminding its viewers that our past and our recollection of it can often be faulty.
A key exchange in the film occurs when Moudir and her grandmother argue about Moudir’s profession. Moudir insists she’s a filmmaker, while her grandmother refuses to accept this, claiming her granddaughter to be a journalist. This scene represents the tension at work throughout the entire film. Zahra seemingly pits the two jobs as dichotomous, one (journalism) representing truth, with the other (filmmaking) representing a distortion of truth. Moudir seems to be doing the work of a journalist, using a genre (documentary) many people associate with trying to objectively find truth. But she uses filmmaking and artistic expression in a way that might obscure the truth of her family history yet discover a more universal truth: that it is often difficult to find consensus when dealing with flawed, subjective human beings.
One could easily watch The Mother of All Lies and take every story that is told as gospel truth. But such a reading would miss the point, and Moudir would be the first to say so. According to Variety, She has stated that her film was meant to demonstrate “the multiplicity of points of view and the plurality of interpretations that exist within one household.” This seems to be truer than any truth she could have uncovered about her family with this risky, rewarding project.
The Mother of All Lies will be released at the Alamo Drafthouse Liberty, NYC on September 6, 2024 and at Laemmle Theaters Los Angeles on September 13, followed by a nationwide release.
