The Mother of All Lies

Saw this at the DOC NYC 2023 Film Festival.

The Mother of All Lies premiered at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival where it won the Un Certain Regard for Best Director for director Asmae El Moudir and upon seeing this movie, I can understand why. It's an very intriguing and fascinating examination on the 1981 Bread Riots in Morocco with interesting themes of family background, lies, and ideas of memories explored. Throughout, the movie blends with real life interviews and claymation models to demonstrate the settings and discussions (similar to The Missing Picture) and Moudir provides strong directing on balancing out the two with strong emotions, themes, and great discussions that are interesting and fascinating to listen to.

The camerawork is beautiful and each participant from family members and so forth provide good discussions and insights about the massacre, family backgrounds, and the traumatic experiences. The uses of the clay models felt purposeful and many of the themes and directions from Moudir felt purposeful and not all over the place. The dialogue and emotions are really good and admittedly, there are still some emotional moments and scenes that are still burned into my memory. My own small issue is that certain pacing moments could have been better.

Overall, I can see why it won the award from Cannes and it's a great documentary.