White Lies Review (IFFR 2026)
Alba Zari, photographer and documentarist, has built her artistic practice around an insistence on inquiry. A survivor of the Children of God cult, she has no access to her childhood memories. Fragments of familial happiness survive on videotape, yet these images offer little insight into the traumatic experiences that shaped her formative years, fractured her family, and widely contributed to her mother’s schizophrenia.
In early adulthood, Zari is determined to face and address the past with both methodological rigour and emotional restraint. Armed with an investigative sensibility and the tools of her post-graduate practice, she adopts a research method grounded in imagination, observation, and elimination. At the centre of this search lies the question of her biological father: an almost entirely unknown figure whose identity remains deliberately and inevitably obscured. White Lies follows Zari’s attempt to bring together the surviving members of her immediate family—mother, father, and grandmother—and to confront them with unresolved questions about their lives under the cult’s abusive regime, and, tentatively, about her own origins.
Archival photos become the film’s primary instruments for initiating dialogue. Yet it is precisely through these documents that Zari arrives at a more unsettling realisation: identity is shaped as much by presence as by absence. Through an iterative use of photographs and archival video, she constructs an audiovisual essay that traces the long, reverberating effects of coercion and psychological manipulation. The film is particularly harrowing in its observation of her mother, whose diffident and unguarded reactions to her daughter’s presence speak of painful, unresolved tensions (internal and external). Zari, by contrast, appears composed and resolute; steadfast in her refusal to inherit silence as a survival strategy.
Equally devastating is the gradual exposure of the cult’s systematic dehumanisation and the moral ambiguity it produces. White Lies resists easy distinctions between victims, perpetrators, and accomplices, recognising how sustained abuse collapses such categories. In this context, assigning responsibility proves less productive than the insistence on questioning itself. The relentless pursuit of why emerges not as a demand for closure, but as the only viable gesture toward understanding.
The film extends a body of work that began with Zari’s book The Y (published by Witty Books in June 2019), where this search was first arranged in a more linear, chronological order, and continued through a series of artistic iterations preceding the documentary. What distinguishes White Lies is the precision with which Zari aligns her analytical framework with deeply personal material. Her sensitivity never drifts into self-indulgence; instead, it underscores the capacity of artistic practice to confront even the most opaque and morally compromised realities. A method of artistic inquiry and emotional coping, I reckon.
Beyond the weight of its subject matter, the film stands out for its formal coherence and visual restraint. Its cross-disciplinary approach feels neither ornamental nor loud, but integral to the core of the investigation. With a notable modesty, White Lies reflects the presence of an artist acutely aware of her position—one who not only occupies it with diligence, but uses it with purpose.
White Lies had its international premiere at the 2026 International Film Festival Rotterdam, in the Bright Future section.
★★★★1/2
White Lies, 99’ (documentary) / Dir: Alba Zari / Cinematography: Matteo Tortone / Editing: Pierpaolo Filomeno / Producer: Manuela Buono / Italy
Discover more from
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
About the Author
