The jury of the 25th Geneva Black Movie Festival (January 19th – 28th) gave its Critics’ Award to Asmae El Moudir’s La Mère de Tous les Mensonges (Mother of all lies).
This Moroccan documentary (which has already won several awards) takes the viewer into a family’s memories and secrets. The film begins with the director discovering that only one photograph of her as a child exists; a photograph which doesn’t even look like her. Faced with the silence surrounding her childhood and determined to understand her past, she asks her father to help her make a model of the area where she grew up. She then invites her family and friends to tell their own stories using puppets.
During the awards ceremony, the jury – Ian Mantgani (Ireland), Laura Pertuy (France) and Irina Trocan (Romania) – commented that: “because of the power of its shots and its original way of recreating events which were intentionally stifled, the film creates a very embodied space between members of a family and their neighbours, where speech is freed and memories resurface.”
Created in 1991 to encourage African films, the Black Movie Festival opened up to films from Asia and Latin America in 1999.
Sources: Black Movie, Cineuropa
