It takes a tiny village (recreating a Casablanca riot) to win the Sydney Film Festival competition

An imaginative dramatised documentary that uses handmade figurines to tell the forgotten story of a riot in Casablanca has won the $60,000 competition at the Sydney Film Festival.

Moroccan director Asmae El Moudir took 10 years to make The Mother Of All Lies, helping her father painstakingly build a mini neighbourhood populated by tiny versions of key figures involved in a traumatic 1981 riot over the rising price of bread.

The Mother Of All Lies uses tiny figures of key participants to tell the story of a traumatic riot in 1981.Credit: Sydney Film Festival

She edited 500 hours of footage into a clever and entertaining film that, with no footage and only one photograph surviving of the riot, draws on her family’s memories of the army killing protesters. It won the best director prize when it debuted in the Un Certain Regard strand at Cannes last month.

The jury for the Sydney competition, which recognises “audacious, cutting-edge and courageous” films, commended El Moudir for tackling a story “perhaps wilfully obliterated from public memory”.

The winner was announced as the festival closed with the Australian premiere of Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny on Sunday night.

A surprised El Moudir told the State Theatre audience she would wake up her family and neighbours who made the film with her in Morocco to tell them about the prize. “[After] 23 hours of flying, I was fighting with the jet lag but now I will sleep well with this prize,” she said.

The Mother Of All Lies beat two lively Australian films in the competition, Warwick Thornton’s drama The New Boy and Allan Clarke’s documentary The Dark Emu Story.

Winner of the $60,000 Sydney Film Prize for The Mother Of All Lies: Asmae El Moudir at the Sydney Film Festival.Credit: Sydney Film Festival

While it was a worthy winner, the stand-out in the competition was a more conventional film: Korean-Canadian director Celine Song’s Past Lives. It’s an achingly beautiful romantic drama about a Korean-Canadian playwright (Greta Lee) who is visited by her childhood first love, a budding Korean engineer (Teo Yoo), while she is married to another writer (John Magaro) in New York.

Past Lives is a gem of a first film that hauntingly deals with the shifting nature of love, memory and culture.

Two more-cutting-edge American films were among the highlights of a festival that, in an encouraging sign for struggling art-house cinemas, drew strong audiences for a long list of buzzy films.

In the tense thriller Reality, rising star Sydney Sweeney (Euphoria, The White Lotus) coolly humanises the real life American intelligence whistleblower Reality Winner.

Playwright-turned-director Tina Satter uses dialogue entirely from the transcripts of FBI agents Garrick (Josh Hamilton) and Taylor (Marchant Davis) interrogating Winner, a 25-year-old translator at an intelligence agency, when she arrives home from grocery shopping in 2017.

Celine Song’s Past Lives – the stand-out in the competition.Credit: StudioCanal

Between mundane exchanges about her pets and hobbies, they gradually pin her down for leaking a document proving Russian cyber interference in the 2016 presidential election in a film that powerfully shows why whistleblowers matter and the price they can pay.

Just as enjoyable was Daniel Goldhaber’s How To Blow Up A Pipeline, a thriller about a gang of youthful environmentalists who, disillusioned with progress in addressing climate change, decide to sabotage an oil pipeline in Texas.

Sydney Sweeney plays whistleblower Reality Winner in Reality.Credit: Lily Olsen/HBO/AP

In a lively adaptation of a non-fiction book by Andreas Malm, Goldhaber gradually feeds in the background stories of these idealistic activists while ratcheting up the tension.

There was another idealistic character in the crowd pleasing Mexican drama Radical. Eugenio Derbez, who was the choir director in Coda, plays an inspirational teacher whose unconventional methods change the lives of students in a neglected school.

In a program that showcased quality films from many leading international directors, including Aki Kaurismaki’s droll romance Fallen Leaves, Kore-eda Hirokazu’s quietly intense drama Monster and Wes Anderson’s deliciously deadpan Asteroid City, one of the best came from German veteran Wim Wenders.

His drama Perfect Days was a warm-hearted triumph about the daily life of a public toilet cleaner in Tokyo. In a performance that won best actor at Cannes, Koji Yakusho brings dignity to a man who takes joy in small pleasures.

Winner of the documentary competition: Derik Lynch in Marungka Tjalatjunu (Dipped in Black)Credit: Sydney Film Festival

The festival’s $20,000 Australian documentary prize went to Derik Lynch and Matthew Thorne’s Marungka Tjalatjunu (Dipped in Black). It shows Lynch, a Yankunytjatjara artist, taking a road trip from Adelaide to his remote Anangu community for a spiritual healing ceremony.

The jury described it as a deeply affecting documentary about “culture, Country, identity and belonging”. They gave an honourable mention to Adrian Russell Wills and Gillian Moody’s Kindred, which is about the two Indigenous directors connecting with their culture after being adopted into white families.

In the Dendy Awards, best live-action short went to David Ma’s The Dancing Girl And The Balloon Man, a Chinatown romance between a dim sum seller and a street performer, and best animated short was Alec Green and Finbar Watson’s Teacups, about Don Ritchie’s life-saving work at The Gap.

The Rouben Mamoulian award for best Australian director went to Sophie Somerville for Linda 4 Eva, about an angst-ridden teenage girl’s day at the beach.

The $40,000 Sustainable Future Award went to Sarvnik Kaur’s Against the Tide, a documentary about two fishermen confronting their changing environment in Mumbai, with high commendations for Rachel Ward’s Rachel’s Farm, about her move into regenerative farming, and Josef Jakamarra Egger’s Power to Country, about a Garrwa woman’s displacement from her traditional homelands.

Email Garry Maddox at [e-mail] and follow him on Twitter at @gmaddox.

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