Courtesy of Megan O'Donnel

A man sits hunched over a splintered, powder-covered table in a dimly lit workshop in Marrakesh, Morocco. Tracing lines onto the surface, he draws an entire soccer field; at the center of the court stands a miniature figure of himself. The man’s dreams of becoming a goalkeeper were shattered 30 years before, when the soccer fields of Casablanca were transformed into the burial site of Moroccan political martyrs. 

This man is Mohamed El Moudir, the father of Asmae El Moudir — who directed, produced and edited “The Mother of All Lies.” This Moroccan documentary opened the Whitney Humanities Center’s “World Documentaries Today,” a series that speaks to how artists and individuals retell national histories in their own terms, according to student curator Lora Maslenitsyna GRD ’28. 

“[In “The Mother of All Lies,”] we have this story of what happened during years of repression in Morocco, and how a lot of people have memories of them, but they’re not allowed to speak about them,” said Maslenitsyna. “We see that as a common theme in a lot of these documentaries, where people really want to bring light to something that has historically been a marginalized issue or has been an official state documentation quietly obscured.”

“The Mother of All Lies” follows El Moudir’s family as they recount and explore their suppressed memories of the Casablanca Bread Riots — a series of violent revolts in 1981 Morocco driven by the high prices of basic food costs. 

World Documentaries Today is a recent initiative under the Films at the Whitney program, which was inaugurated in 2009. Through the new documentary program, graduate students can submit proposals for film series, said Megan O’Donnell, the associate communications officer at the Whitney Humanities Center. 

This fall’s series was curated by Maslenitsyna, a third-year doctoral student studying film and media studies, as well as Slavic languages and literature. Beginning with “The Mother of All Lies,” the series continues for the remainder of the fall semester with “Ramona,” “Iron Butterflies,” “Man in Black” and “Onlookers.” 

Before the lights dimmed out, El Moudir, who traveled to New Haven from New York, stood in front of the audience and invited them to “watch [her] country in [her] grandmother.” This ambiguous sentence acquired more and more weight, as audiences found parallels between her grandmother’s silenced memories and the fear that haunts the nation’s minds.

In the documentary, El Moudir explores the experience of her own family, including her grandmother Zahra Jeddaoui and parents Ouardia Zorkani and Mohamed El Moudir, as well as her close family friends Said Masrour and Abdallah EZ Zouid.

Thousands of young people participated in these riots and destroyed symbols of wealth: buses, expensive cars, banks and grocery stores. While the government’s official death toll is 66, other groups have reported numbers as high as 637. 

Most of the fatalities occurred from government repression, as police and military shot into the crowds. Among the deaths include many acquaintances of the El Moudir family, including their neighbor’s sister, Fatima. 

El Moudir describes Fatima as “a memory with no body:” Though many knew about her death, her body was never recovered. Her death, much like the deaths of others, is clouded by a lack of transparency and information — both from the government which refuses to acknowledge the violent nature of their passing, as well as reluctant community members who fear further repression. 

If Fatima is “a memory with no body,” El Moudir inversely describes the Moroccan people as “bodies without memory.” The Moroccan people estrange themselves from the violent memories, starting from the lack of visual documentation, both governmental and personal, to the refusal to recount personal experiences pertaining to the bread riots. 

To travel 30 years into the past and recover their buried memories, the El Moudirs build a miniature model of their neighborhood in Casablanca. Many of the dolls used in reenactments of the past were created by her father and the garments by her mother. 

As the narrative unfolds through these minifigures within this constructed space, the film calls attention to the utter lack of documentation of the events. 

To many individuals who feared speaking out or documenting their experiences following the riots, their memories diverge from national, officialized accounts of history. 

In an interview with the News, El Moudir said that the idea for the documentary was born from a lone photograph she found of her childhood, when she helped her parents move houses. She wondered why there was only one.

She began questioning the absence of pictures from her childhood, going so far as doubting that she was the girl portrayed at all, she said. 

“That was the starting point in reflecting on why we erase memories in the house,” said El Moudir. “In 2016 I discovered in a TV program that a big riot took place and even here there were no pictures. And then I understood that my little family stories were only symptoms of other bigger ones.”

Today, what began with a single picture has grown into a personal archive of memories. The one-and-a-half-hour-long film is a shaved-down product of more than 500 hours of footage Moudir collected since 2016.

The documentation process was not easy. El Moudir said that her subjects believed that the “walls have ears” and avoided standing in front of the camera. This made it extremely difficult for her to capture authentic footage of the family, as they reflected on their past. 

“I was trying every time to make my camera non-existent because it scared everybody, and my grandmother didn’t want to talk in front of the camera,” said El Moudir. “We can talk together without any problem but when I bring out the camera everyone tries to become another person, and that doesn’t work for me.”

The documentary reaches a moment of catharsis when El Moudir and her companions intentionally destroy the carefully made miniature set of Casablanca. Tiny tables are tipped over, dust covers the streets and miniature people are run over by tanks led by El Moudir’s hand. 

By adopting what she defines as “savage” and unconventional filmmaking strategies, El Moudir helps the audience journey through what she defines as a “therapeutic” process of documentation. 

Over the course of 90 minutes, audiences can witness El Moudir’s grandmother, as she undergoes a clear transformation. She begins as a territorial and afraid figure — the embodiment of the general public’s reluctance to speak out and their adhesion to rules. 

Through the recreation of the violent episodes of the ’80s within the miniature world — assisted by the stories of other survivors — Grandma is forced to come to terms with the reality of her past.

When an audience member asked El Moudir about her grandmother’s growth, El Moudir said that the film has helped soften her grandmother’s stance on free speech, as well as an acceptance towards El Moudir’s career as a director, of which she previously disapproved. 

“Films can change relationships,” said El Moudir. 

“The Mother of All Lies” premiered worldwide at the 76th edition of the Cannes Film Festival and won El Moudir the Un Certain Regard award for Best Director.