Interview: Asmae El Moudir – The Mother of All Lies

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It’s a hybrid docu made on the small scale and dealing with a past that is pieced together through memory and a maquette, the painstakingly beautiful gem of a film presented at this year’s Un Certain Regard section in Cannes (where it won the section’s Best Director award and L’Œil d’Or – for the Best Documentary film on the Croisette) would become Morocco’s submission for the Best International feature category at the 2024 Oscars. Asmae El Moudir‘s The Mother of All Lies is a highly personal and political film — it’s powerful cinema by way of El Moudir’s innovative exploration of the narratives and the transformative potential of art in confronting concealed individual and collective memories.

I had the good fortune to speak to Asmae at the Toronto Intl. Film Festival – we discussed how one mounts a decade spanning project, how one builds narrative threads with so much material, the strategy behind setting the different conversations and the current state of the flourishing Moroccan cinema scene.

Eric Lavallée
Eric Lavalléehttps://www.ericlavallee.com
Eric Lavallée is the founder, CEO, editor-in-chief, film journalist, and critic at IONCINEMA.com, established in 2000. A regular at Sundance, Cannes, and Venice, Eric holds a BFA in film studies from the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. In 2013, he served on the narrative competition jury at the SXSW Film Festival. He was an associate producer on Mark Jackson’s "This Teacher" (2018 LA Film Festival, 2018 BFI London). In 2022, he was a New Flesh Juror for Best First Feature at the Fantasia International Film Festival. His top films for 2023 include The Zone of Interest (Glazer), Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell (Pham Thien An), Totem (Lila Avilés), La Chimera (Alice Rohrwacher), All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt (Raven Jackson). He is a Golden Globes Voter.

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