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Film Screening and Director Q&A : The Mother of All Lies : Asmae El Moudir : Yale Alice Cinema
September 5 @ 7:00 pm
Join us for the first installment of Films at the Whitney’s Fall 2024 screening series, World Documentaries Today, featuring director Asmae El Moudir in person!
Winner of the 2023 Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard Best Director Award, Moroccan filmmaker Asmae El Moudir searches for the truth about her family’s history and its place within the national narrative of the 1981 Casablanca Bread Riots. In her family, the period of repression known in Morocco as the “Years of Lead” is rarely discussed, and her grandmother was prohibited from creating any images or photographs of the events. To explore the narratives of trauma, loss, and love surrounding her mysterious past, El Moudir creates a scale model of her childhood street in the Sebata district of Casablanca, with the help of her father, who sculpts the clay miniatures, and her mother, who dresses them. In the film, El Moudir’s friends, neighbors, and, after much difficulty, her grandmother use the figurines to reenact their memories. The Mother of All Lies is at once a poetic and cathartic investigation of one neighborhood’s collective memory.
