Moroccan filmmaker Asmae El Moudir’s discusses how she unraveled her family's, and her country's web of lies around the 1981 Bread Riots — using model figurines — in her Cannes award-winning documentary.
“Pictures were always forbidden in the family house, my grandmother said it was for religious reasons,” El Mourdir tells. “But in the film, I discovered that wasn’t the truth, that there was a deeper, more personal reason to do with trauma and with something that happened with my grandmother.”
With no physical evidence to work with — no family photos, no video footage of the riots — El Moudir rebuilds her Moroccan neighborhood, and her family’s old apartment, in a scale model, from memory, with handmade figurines, sculpted by her father and dressed by her mother, of her family and friends. With this dollhouse in place as a kind of therapeutic tool, she begins to bring in the eyewitnesses, coaxing out their long-dormant stories.
The approach is not without risks. Under its new king, conditions in Morocco are much improved from the “Years of Lead,” as the period of repression from the early 60s to the late 80s was known. But the country still has a shaky relationship with human rights and what happened during the Bread Riots is almost never discussed publicly.
“I was trying to understand how we invent stories when we don’t have any concrete or visual proof of what has happened. How do we reconstruct the past?” she says. “I tried to create this space to bring together the real elements, my family and neighbors, and these constructed elements. That’s why I insist in the film that I’m a filmmaker, not a journalist. As a journalist, I would go into the details of what happened, with the names of the people involved.
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