By Jessica Herndon
One of the most exciting things about the Sundance Film Festival is having a front-row seat for the bright future of independent filmmaking. While we can learn a lot about the filmmakers from the 2024 Sundance Film Festival through the art that these storytellers share with us, there's always more we can learn about them as people. This year, we decided to get to the bottom of those artistic wells with our ongoing series: Give Me the Backstory!
When documentary filmmaker Asmae El Moudir began making The Mother of All Lies in 2012, she could only find one photo connected to the story she wanted to tell. The story was that of her family and their connection to the 1981 Casablanca Bread Riots in Morocco, El Moudir's home country. What started as a simple question for El Moudir - Why didn't she have any photos of her family or childhood? - grew into an artistic quest for the filmmaker, whose doc screened in the Spotlight section of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival after premiering at the 76th Cannes Film Festival, where El Moudir won the Un Certain Regard Best Director award.
While piecing together her family's past, she learned that 600 protestors who opposed increased food prices had been killed in one day while rioting in Casablanca near the home where her family lived until 2016. El Moudir's kin had hoped to leave the events of that day in the past. But she refused to be deterred and got her grandmother, mother, and father to appear in the documentary, which also relies on animated miniature marionettes to tell the mysterious story, as filming in her hometown was difficult.
For the filmmaker, The Mother of All Lies is built on the power of resurrecting sweet and haunting memories. My film is about oral memory, she says. If images are erased and bodies are hidden or disappeared, people's memories are still recalled. Through my film I want to say that we must never crush or erase a black or white past. It's the past of generations, and we must preserve it and assume it, because each generation needs to re-appropriate its past, to identify with it, in order to move on to the future.
Below, El Moudir discusses the message behind The Mother of All Lies, the biggest challenge she faced while making the documentary, and how she got into filmmaking.
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By Jessica Herndon 
