Rating: 4/5
Anti-Criterion Challenge 2024 | 36/52 | Documentary about Africa by an African director
Asmae El Moudier works with her father, Mohamed, to create a miniature recreation of the street she grew up on in the Sebata district of Casablanca. Using the set, she recreates memories from her childhood perspective while folding in stories she learns from her family. The story begins with a lie her grandmother Zahra told the family: that taking a photograph is a sin.
As a child, Asmae slipped out of her house during Laylat al-Qadr, a festival where children dress as adults in traditional clothes. Little girls could dress as brides on the Amaria throne and get their photos taken. Because Asmae could not afford the throne experience, she got her photo taken in front of a backdrop depicting Hawaii. This would be the first photo of her and her last for a while.
The film travels to the neighborhood to capture footage of the area to accompany the miniatures and to inform the miniature depiction, as the family has no documents of their experiences.
In confronting this lie her grandmother told, the director is not chasing capital-T truth but rather a proliferation of perspectives and the understanding that comes with them. With no documented photos of events, her household contained multiple interpretations of the same events.
Asmae spent years trying to convince her grandmother to be in the documentary. After all, this would be documenting her. It was only through hiring a woman to tell her grandmother’s stories that she relented.
What feels like a gimmick at first arrives at a place of catharsis and processing of trauma for people whose stories went unheard until this documentary. Through this form of storytelling, the documentary unveils darker stories, such as the violent military crackdown in Asmae’s neighborhood during the 1981 Bread Riots.
This film is rough to get through in parts but such a vital document.