Winning the L’Oeil d’or honor automatically qualifies both films for Oscar consideration.
Two Arab female filmmakers have shared L’Oeil d’or (Golden Eye) award for Best Documentary at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.
Four Daughters (Les Filles d’Olfa) by Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania and The Mother of All Lies (La Mère de tous les mensonges) by Moroccan filmmaker Asmae El Moudir were announced as the winners at a joint ceremony.
The L’Oeil d’or prize, first presented in 2015, was created by LaScam, the French society of multi-media authors, in cooperation with the Cannes Film Festival.
In The Mother of All Lies, El Moudir explores her family’s history and the stories and lies told surrounding the upheaval and violence of the 1981 Bread Riots in Casablanca. With no archive footage or even photographs, to draw on, she painstakingly recreates, from memory, her family’s old apartment and the old Casablanca neighbourhood in the form of a miniature set on a soundstage, with figurines to represent her family members.
Four Daughters centres on Olfa Hamrouni and her children – the titular four daughters. The eldest two disappeared from Tunisia as teenagers, with evidence pointing to them being swept up into ISIS. The director made the unusual choice to hire actors to play the missing daughters in the documentary, as a means of exploring the family’s trauma.
