On a handmade set re-creating 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.—JN

Available in person. Also available online for the public (January 25–28) and credentialed press and industry (January 24–28).