Interviews

Interview: Asmae El Moudir – The Mother of All Lies

Published on October 17, 2023

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 Lavallée is the founder, CEO, editor-in-chief, film journalist and critic at IONCINEMA.com (founded in 2000). Eric is a regular at Sundance, Cannes and TIFF. He has a BFA in Film Studies at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. In 2013 he served as a Narrative Competition Jury Member 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 served as a New Flesh Comp for Best First Feature at the 2022 Fantasia Intl. Film Festival. Current top films for 2022 include Tár (Todd Field), All That Breathes (Shaunak Sen), Aftersun (Charlotte Wells).