The Mother of All Lies/ Down in Dallas Town: Truth in Documentaries

As the DOCNYC festival illustrated, the genre of non-fiction films remains a vibrant frontier. Asmae El Moudir’s THE MOTHER OF ALL LIES, awarded Best Documentary in Cannes and Morocco’s entry for the Best International Feature Oscar, tells a hidden history through clay figurines. The “Bread Wars” in Morocco in the early 1980’s garnered little attention internationally, but locally, in Casablanca and other cities, riots were brutally suppressed, and silence about the horror was enforced.

In filmmaker Asmae El Moudir’s home, where she lived with her parents and grandmother, a photograph of King Hassan II hung prominently, her grandmother’s favorite. Her father made clay figures that she used to dramatize—or speak of—the violence in her country’s past. Dividing her time between Rabat and Paris, but preferring home in Morocco, Asmae El Moudir attended a special screening of her film at the Quad cinema recently, navigating the enthusiastic crowd’s amazement at the subtle revelations of truth about an untoward political history.

On the anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the mysteries linger in the memories constructed of photographs, music, and the site itself. That is the subject of Alan Govenar’s latest documentary, DOWN IN DALLAS TOWN: FROM JFK TO K2. Govenar’s style segues on the slimmest of transitions from a famous Polaroid by Mary Ann Moorman, interviewed for the very first time, to American blues, to the homeless who house themselves in cardboard dwellings at Dealey Plaza, where JFK died in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

Govenar’s strategies shouldn’t work, but somehow his technique replicates the flow of the mind, moving, celebrating the ways we remember difficult times. As to the last, the president was in the midst of a war on poverty when he was shot in his historic motorcade, observed Govenar at his movie’s New York premiere at the Cinema Village. His last film was a meditation on what we call Home. Homelessness, a by-product of poverty, is rampant now.  Many democratic ideals died with President Kennedy.