‘Mother of All Lies’ Hits Sundance with Oscar Hopeful Asmae El Moudir

Back in 2012, Asmae El Moudir started her magnum opus, “The Mother of all Lies,” which debuted at Cannes 2023, where it won the Best Documentary prize. Morocco submitted the film for Oscar consideration, and it made the International shortlist, though not Best Documentary; the PGA nominated the film for Best Documentary, and it won Best Director from the IDA. “The Mother of All Lies” is playing in the Sundance Spotlight section (where screenings are sold out) and is nominated for Foreign Language Feature at the Independent Spirit Awards.

The movie accomplished this without a distributor. Morocco has supported El Moudir with a modest number of screenings, a publicist, and a place to stay in Los Angeles (with Moroccan Ministry of Culture representative and translator Khadija Alami).

The movie is a testament to dogged creativity. El Moudir, in seeking to explode her family secrets, persuaded her builder father to help her fashion clay puppets and elaborate sets in order to relate the story of the 1981 Casablanca bread riots, witnessed and then suppressed by her family and neighbors. “I wanted to have the soul in front of no soul,” said El Moudir, who used the puppets as a way to get participants in the riots to talk.

After two years of just recording people talking in her home in Casablanca, where her grandmother forbade all cameras and photographs, El Moudir decided to rent an atelier in Marrakesh, where she and her father built the sets and…