Kent and Wonder discuss the artful and personal documentary, The Mother of All Lies, which explores the 1981 Casablanca Bread Riots through the family of the director, who pushes her family to remember and recount this pivotal event despite their practiced resistance to doing so. Themes that emerge are the damage and generational harm secrecy inflicts, the way secrecy is often a necessary survival strategy in the wake of horrific governmental abuse, the effort it takes to reclaim one’s history in the absence of remembering it, and the potential healing available when one makes the effort, especially within family and/or community. Astrologically these themes relate to the 4th and 12th houses, Saturn Jupiter conjunctions, Saturn Pluto conjunctions and Mercury in hard aspect to Saturn. Also a brief mention of those millennials born between 1988-1994 when Saturn transited through Capricorn and Aquarius alongside the outer planets.
Distribution: More info
Director: Asmae El Moudir
Run Time: 96 minutes
Astrological Data: There appear to be a few dates for this riot, perhaps there was more than one riot. We used the date attached to descriptions of this film provided by the filmmaker, one can be found here.
Music Credit: spacedust by airtone
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:13.479] Kent Bye: My name is Kent Bye. Wonder Bright: And I'm Wonder Bright. Kent Bye: And welcome to the Story All The Way Down podcast, where we're breaking down the archetypal dynamics of stories. This second season, we're looking at the Sundance documentaries from 2024. So this is episode three out of six of the section on Family, Land, and Ancestors. And so today's episode we're going to be diving into a piece called The Mother of all Lies. It's in the Spotlight section and directed by Azmé El-Majir. So, Wonder, maybe you could read the synopsis for Mother of All Lies.
[00:00:47.737] Wonder Bright: On a handmade set recreating her Casablanca neighborhood, a young Moroccan filmmaker enlists family and friends to help unearth the troubling lies built into her childhood. For filmmaker Asmae El Moudir, those lies began with the conspicuous absence of childhood photographs and her grandmother's dubious explanations. As she discovers, the truth lies in Casablanca's bread riots of 1981 and the government's violent crackdown, long since concealed and banished from the collective memory. Lacking archival evidence, El Moudir and her father build a meticulously detailed model of their former neighborhood, incorporating handmade figurines. In enlisting the help of family, friends, and neighbors, she effectively creates an intervention, pushing them to confront the truth through its many perspectives, even that of her scornful grandmother, the authoritarian matriarch who embodies this willful amnesia. Premiering at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, El Moudir’s extraordinary project offers a unique, spellbinding approach to excavating a painful history. And that synopsis was brought to us by Sundance programmer John Nein.
[00:02:02.265] Kent Bye: So yeah, this is a piece that is doing this archaeological dig of memories, but through these models that the filmmaker, she's featured herself in it, right?
[00:02:13.516] Wonder Bright: Yeah, she's in the film all over the place, talking to her father, building the science. She's so cool. I love this kid.
[00:02:21.658] Kent Bye: So the director of this piece is featuring herself as a protagonist as she's bringing her family together. And I imagine that her father is already building these types of sets. This feels like some of his life passion to essentially recreate the neighborhood from where they grew up, to try to unpack what happened on the Casablanca bread riots, which broke out on May 29th, 1981. Reading from Wikipedia, I think just to add a little bit more context to this story, because this is a piece that you kind of learn about all this as you're watching it. I didn't have a lot of context for this specific event, but there was a riot that broke out on May 29th, 1981. It was a major event in the years of lead under Hassan II of Morocco. And in the events section of the Wikipedia page, it says, “thousands of young people from impoverished shantytowns surrounding Casablanca formed large mobs and proceeded to destroy symbols of wealth in the city, including buses, banks, pharmacies, grocery stores, and expensive cars. police and military units fired into the crowds. The government's official death toll was 66, while the opposition reported a much higher number of 637. Much of the fatalities were youths from the slums shot to death." So this tragedy happened right in the neighborhood for where the director El Moudir had grown up. And so this was a part of her life that she wasn't, I don't think she was born then, right?
[00:03:47.814] Wonder Bright: I don't think she could have been. She's, I'm going to look her up and see how old she is… Oh, she was born in 1990.
[00:03:52.780] Kent Bye: Okay. Yeah. So this is a, an event that happened before she was born, but this clearly had a huge impact on her family and trying to excavate some of these memories it's a little bit experimental in the way of trying to create a spatial context for these memories to come about. And it seemed like they were kind of locked into this room for a number of days. It was a very odd narrative structure that I'd never quite seen before, but it felt like a very contrived gathering of people into the space to try to really get at the core of this event. And so she's bringing together not only her family, but also the neighbors who lived in this area as well to come back and share different parts of what they remember from this event in 1981.
[00:04:35.970] Wonder Bright: Yeah, it's interesting to me that as you were reading the Wikipedia entry for the 1981 bread riots, and you were describing the scenes of chaos that ensued, I was seeing, in my mind's eye, I was seeing the model that her father built of the riot, of the aftermath with the bodies in the street. But I was seeing this wonderful model that he created. And I agree with you. It's a story that is told in a really unique way. I had not remembered what section it was in and I just assumed it was from the Next section which is often very experimental because this film has that about it. The whole film is set as if it was on a soundstage, in a very, very large studio room, that has been given over entirely to the production of these big models with desks all around it, where family members and people from the old neighborhood have been working on the models, like the parts of the models that then go into the models. And El Moudir has set up a dolly track for the camera to go through and around all of those tables and around the model that they've built. So the film kind of goes back and forth between these really intimate expressions when you're looking at the model and you're hearing someone talk about the events that they can recall from that day. And then also you feel that you're on a stage, like a stage set. And so El Moudir really is playing with the idea of what is real, so that as an audience member, I'm questioning what is real. But that, of course, is the point. She's using all of those artificial things and drawing our attention to the fact that they're artificial. Like normally I'm not super aware that I'm watching a camera on a dolly track, but she removes the artifice from the fact that that's what it is, and she's making it bare that she's using these techniques to illustrate the point, which is, they're trying to reconstruct their memory of this time. And it's fine to lay bare the construction process, that that's actually a part of the memory, and that it needs to be done, all of them together. There's one sequence, especially, that just really sticks in my mind where I think it was the first time that I became aware that the camera was on this dolly and she's moving around the stage and you see all of the people in the community sitting at their individual tables, sort of arrested, and she must have told them what to do. That's part of the thing that's so unusual is that she has a very strong vision as a director, and you often hear her directing, and then people moving into action, and then you often see these people who are all older than her, often by, like, you know, at least 20 or 30 years, and they're moving into action around her very, like, obediently, basically. And it’s, like, her very strong point of view, and her need to understand what happened in this moment before she was born that she somehow instinctively knows is underpinning all of her life's history in a way that she can't understand. And she's demanding these memories to come back from people in whom the memory has been buried, or it has literally been forgotten. So there's these moments of just, sort of like, deep consternation, the consternation and being confounded seems to be part of the process of this film. And it's just really thoughtfully created. And that thoughtfulness, and the, like, strong vision doesn't get in the way of the curiosity at the heart of it. Which it could do, you know, her strong vision could create the narrative. And yet I have the experience that it unfolds, that it's a process of discovery. Which, for those of us who have lived with secrets in our lives, there is this process where we go through this experience of, like doubting ourselves, because if something has happened to us, and then we can't talk about it, there is this doubt that it ever happened to the point that it becomes this existential threat of, like, do I even exist? Because we just can't trust our memory. We can't trust ourselves. And the experience of watching this entire community go through this joint process of attention and intention and creation is really powerful.
[00:09:47.705] Kent Bye: Hmm. Yeah, I wanted to start by reading some of the Wikipedia article because there's a discrepancy between what the government is claiming, of 66 people dying versus, like, 10 times that amount, of over 600 people dying. And so you have the situation where the government had sort of memory holed this as an event, where I think there may have been one photo that survived that was shown, but all other evidence of this event was eradicated. And so I think part of the dynamic of the story was that anybody that may have born witness to anything, was sworn to secrecy under the threat of death. And so you have this situation where there are people who are coming forth and now sharing what they saw, but there's still people who are under that threat of terror that their lives might be in danger if they share what they saw. This grandmother ends up being this, almost like a, chief antagonist throughout the course of this film, where she is super grumpy, very saturnine, very restrictive, and kind of like a totalitarian matriarch, that ends up a lot of the conflict in this piece is in and around the interpersonal dynamics of the grandmother kind of being rough around the edges and bumping up against all the other people that were there. And at some point, somebody storms out because of some interaction that they had with this grandmother matriarch figure. And so you have this story dynamic where the director, El Moudir, is really trying to create a context to sit with the tension of these memories and to really excavate what actually happened. Because I think there's something where she's really searching for this deeper truth of this ancestral healing of getting the truth to be spoken, so that there could be things that her life has been impacted by this event and all the different resulting dynamics that have continued to play out throughout the course of her life. For me, there's a lot of the 12th House secret themes, but also themes of Saturn, which I'll get into a little bit more here in a moment. But I wanted to pass it over to you to hear a little bit more of you unpacking either the primary significations or how this also ties into the broader theme of Family and Land and Ancestors.
[00:11:55.069] Wonder Bright: So I put this under the 4th House expression because so much of the story does belong to the family. We have the director being, like, a main protagonist and moving this story forward. And she enlists the help of her father to build all these models. And then, of course, both of them are really struggling under the onus of this dictatorial, as you put it, eye of the paternal grandmother. So it's really truly about this family. The film is called The Mother of All Lies. And yet for me, the theme that I would most like to focus on is the 12th House, which is the house of secrets, sorrows and loss. And I wanted to put a 12th House film in the canon of 4th House because it is so often the case that when we suffer trauma, that original trauma is compounded by the fact that our family of origin will not allow us to talk about it. And so that's actually one of the most egregious harms that I think can happen to us, is that space of not being able to communicate that something actually happened, or is happening to us, that we are not believed, and then the trauma becomes compounded. And in this instance, as you just pointed out, it's not just the family of origin. It's the culture. It's the government. It just keeps going out and out and out forever, which, you know, is often the case. There's a reason that teenage transgender and queer youth are the most likely to die by suicide. And it's because they're being told there's something wrong with them, and then there's something wrong with them that there's something wrong with them. And they're not allowed to have a conversation about it. So there's a special kind of trauma that is induced around secrecy. And it is the domain of the 12th House because we become exiled. We can no longer be in connected space with one another. It's basically the experience of, you know, we talk all the time on this podcast about bearing witness. Well, the 12th House is one of the most difficult places to get a witness. Can I get a witness? No. No, you cannot. That did not happen to you. It is not happening to you. It is denied. And that creates a real exile for someone that is in existential angst. And one of the things that is so moving to me about what Asmae El Moudir did in this film is that she enlists the help of the community to confront this head on. And it's so interesting, actually, because she is so strident and dogmatic and kind of righteous. She has this fury in her that is just fiery. It's just a firestorm. And the very first sequence is a scene between her and her grandmother where she's trying to get this hearing aid connected to her grandmother. And they are - it is - it is a fight. It is an absolute battle between the two of them. And it's such a brilliant scene to establish this film. Because on the one hand, you see that she is a match for her grandmother. Half the reason I think the community around her is responding to the director the way they do, is because they're used to obeying a very strong, strident woman in the guise of her grandmother. And so when Asmae steps into this role, they're like, yes, ma'am. They just kind of go along with her. So she's this huge match for her grandmother. But in that opening sequence, she's applying a hearing aid to her grandmother, who is being really difficult. And you can't really tell whether or not she can actually hear her granddaughter or if she can't. She's saying she can't, that the hearing aid is crap. But then you really start to suspect that she's just being stubborn.
[00:16:16.806] Kent Bye: Well, it is a sequence where she asks grandmother, why do you not have any photos? Or why do you not allow any photos to be taken? And at that point, the grandmother had been claiming that she hadn't heard anything. So then she gives her a look, her whole emotional disposition changes, because she's clearly heard it, even though she has been claiming that she hadn't been hearing this. And then the title screen comes up, The Mother of All Lies. And so a lot of the ways it's centered on the dynamic of the grandmother, but I wanted to call in this date of May 29th, 1981, which is the date of the Bread Riots and just pull up the chart and look at a couple of the signatures. So in around like 1980 to 1984, there's a conjunction between Saturn and Pluto, which is the same Saturn-Pluto conjunction that we talked about at the beginning of January of 2020, which is like marking the beginning of the pandemic. And we've talked about the Saturn-Pluto in other episodes. And before diving in further, I want to just comment that the Mother of All Lies could actually fit within this first section that we had, which is all about the Faith and Rituals, because this does feel like a healing ritual that she is constructing for her family. I feel like it could sort of fit within the Deconstructing Structures of Power section because there were so many themes of Saturn-Pluto that were playing out in the second section. But again, this isn't necessarily deconstructing those power structures, it's just a reflection of those power structures and the impact of that type of totalitarian nature of the government at that time. But we have a conjunction between Jupiter and Saturn, Jupiter at zero degrees Libra and Saturn at three degrees Libra. And then Pluto and Libra at 21 degrees. And so, over the next number of years, that complex of Saturn-Pluto is really coming into play. And there also happened to be an opposition of Mars in Taurus at 24 degrees, opposite Uranus and Scorpio at 27 degrees. And so you have this erratic revolt of liberation impulses for people rising up, but also faced with the aggressive use of force by the government at the time. Anywhere from 60 to 600 people were killed. There was more likely over 600 people killed. But yeah, I just wanted to bring in that there was another dimension of the Saturn-Pluto complex that is looking at the structures of power and that kind of totalitarian impulse that is kind of reflected in the context of what unfolds in this event that's being described with the kind of reactionary force to those riots.
[00:18:43.757] Wonder Bright: So the most striking thing to me about this chart is that there's a Saturn-Jupiter conjunction. And Saturn-Jupiter conjunctions happen every 20 years. Saturn and Jupiter have a really awkward relationship in some ways because they describe very different kinds of experiences. Saturn is all about structure and constraint. isolation and contemplation. And Jupiter is much more about exploration and faith and ideals. So the thing that's interesting about these two planets together is that The relationship between the two of them often describes tests of faith. So you get these expressions of a real need to provide and bring structure to experiences of deep faith. Alternatively, structure becomes very dogmatic and the idea of faith becomes too restrained. And in this particular chart, you see that Mercury is configured to that conjunction by a square. So the principle that is under pressure from that experience of a test of faith is a mercurial one. In other words, communication is being met with a really strong dose of, like, a test of faith around your ability to communicate things. You know, when Saturn and Jupiter are working together in a way that is really wonderful, you might see something arise like the birth chart of John Lennon, who had this ability to create the song, Imagine All the People, right? “Imagine all the people living in peace”. He's saying this thing that isn't happening, but by naming, “imagine it happening”, he's both drawing our attention to the fact that it's possible and that it's not happening. So it's this extremely evocative statement around both the expression of constraint and the expression of faith. So when Saturn and Jupiter in hard aspect are operating on all full cylinders, there's that possibility of being able to bring truth and justice to actually being able to work through something. But you will have to work through something, that's almost assured, because it isn't going to be obvious. And in this case, we're looking at an instance where the communication around the event around the Bread Riots was halted and constrained, i.e. Mercury square to Saturn. But it may prove too much to keep down for long, because the pressure to speak is so much that these young people swarmed the streets in response to it. And, you know, how long can a secret of that magnitude be contained? And it feels like Asmae El Moudir is really trying to answer that question.
[00:22:00.417] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah, in a way that's really quite innovative of trying to find new ways of telling that story. Like you said, it very easily could have been in the Next category, but I don't know if it was because it was already premiered at the Cannes Film Festival that they put it into the Spotlight to be able to highlight some of these films that are out there. So yeah, I guess as we start to think about this as a film to potentially be prescribed as a remedial measure, who would you prescribe this film to?
[00:22:30.359] Wonder Bright: I would prescribe this for anyone who has had to keep a secret within their family, anyone whose family has had to keep a secret, anyone who's had to keep their family a secret. This is a film about the impact of secrets inside a family. So it's very much a 12th House, 4th House film.
[00:22:55.045] Kent Bye: Beautiful. And yeah, as I think about what I want to bear witness to in The Mother of All Lies, I want to just highlight the innovative narrative structure and the use of these type of dollhouse representations to not only give a visual backdrop to be able to tell the story, because like we had talked about, all documentary evidence of this event has pretty much been eradicated. So how do you tell a story of an experience, an event, that is only within the context of memories? And so to recreate this spatial architecture, it feels like a sort of fusion of virtual reality concepts where you're creating a spatial context, but it's in a miniature tabletop scale in this case, where they're able to recreate all these different scenes and then use that as a primary mode of telling the story. There's one scene in particular when one of the neighbors who is brought in to share his own experience of getting put into this prison, he is actually taking the doll of himself and then putting it in the context of this jail and then showing each step by step what had happened to him. And it feels like this real cathartic moment to tap into another level of telling the story, just to have this spatial representation of what had happened to him, that he's really able to take not only his memories, but the emotional experiences of how intense that was and how that fits into the broader complex of how there are many people who went through a lot of traumas over that day. So just the way that she found a way to tell the story, and also this kind of, like, new forms of not only community healing by bringing together the neighborhood to tell these stories, but also this intergenerational healing where, to try to get to the heart of sharing the experiences and telling the truth, breaking the taboos that has been maintaining these secrets for so long. So yeah, I want to just second those primary significations of the 12th House and the 4th House, but also just to honor the new innovative modes in which that the story is being told in The Mother of All Lies.
[00:24:58.781] Wonder Bright: Hmm. Yeah, I want to bear witness to Asmae El Moudir’s innovative filmmaking and her clear vision. The final sequence of the film is a drone shot of her with the model of the neighborhood from her childhood in the middle of the street, and we are watching her playing with the dolls in the middle of the street. And after all this time that we've spent in this loft space, and this, really, almost claustrophobic experience of being so close with the models and so close with the individuals that are connected to the creation of those models, all of a sudden we're actually outside for, I think it's the very first time in the film. And, as the film lifts up, we start on the ground level where we're looking at the model still. And then as we lift up, we're in the street, and then we're up above the neighborhood, and then we're up above the city. And we don't have El Moudir’s birthday, but we do know she's born in 1990, is a member of those millennials that I mentioned in our episode on Black Box Diaries, which are Millennials who were born between 1988 and 1994 when Saturn was going through Capricorn and Aquarius, and at the same time Uranus and Neptune were going through Capricorn. So they have this very unique capacity to name things and identify structures that are no longer working for us, specifically around areas where people are experiencing being different in the culture as represented by those outer planetary transits. And they have a real unique capacity, in my opinion, to identify what is harming us in our cultures and to be able to name it and point to it in ways that are proving really healing for all of us. And I feel like Asmae El Moudir certainly does that in this film. And I feel really grateful to have been able to witness it.
[00:27:16.541] Kent Bye: Indeed. Well, that was The Mother of all Lies. And that's all we have for today. And I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Story All the Way Down podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do, spread the word, tell your friends, and consider signing up for the newsletter at storyallthewaydown.com. Thanks for listening. Wonder Bright: Thank you.
