While photographs can be lies and we’re probably all taking and distributing too many pictures of ourselves in the age of smartphones, there’s something to be said for having these accessible mementos of a life lived, at least as reference for later on, when you might be clamoring for proof that you actually existed. And while audio-visual evidence isn’t necessary for us to remember everything, there can be an extent to which an absence of documentation can prove an existential burden. It can be difficult to build an identity when your memories are unreliable. If you have no visual record of you as a child, your parents, or guardians at that time, or what your home looked like, to what extent can you trust what you think you remember?

This is one of the central ideas driving Moroccan filmmaker Asmae El Moudir’s riveting, inventive Un Certain Regard entry The Mother of All Lies. Her film starts with the desire to know why she has only one photograph from her childhood, and why the girl presented in the image seems to be so different from her. From that starting point, she reaches a point of recreating her family’s home and neighborhood in miniature form, as means of interrogating both personal and national history…

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