Moufida Tlatli, the Tunisian director whose film “The Silences of the Palace” was the first international hit for a filmmaker from the Arab world in 1994, died on February 7th in Tunis. She was 78 years old.
Her daughter Selima Chaffai said the cause was Covid-19.
“The Silences of the Palace”, which Ms. Tlatli co-directed and wrote with Nouri Bouzid, is set in the mid-1960s, but mainly consists of flashbacks to a decade before Tunisia gained independence from France.
The protagonist, a young woman named Alia (played by Hend Sabri), reflects the impotence of women in this earlier era, including her mother Khedija (Amel Hedhili), a servant in the palace of Tunisian princes. Alias memories show that even in the more liberated milieu of her time she has not achieved real autonomy.
“Silences” won several international awards, including a special mention in the best debut feature category in Cannes, which makes Ms. Tlatli the first female Arab director to be honored by this film festival. It was shown at the New York Film Festival later that year. Caryn James of the New York Times called it “a fascinating and accomplished film” in her review.
In an interview, Hichem Ben Ammar, a Tunisian documentary filmmaker, said “Silences” was “the first Tunisian film to hit the American market”.
Its importance was particularly great for women in the generally patriarchal film industry of the Arab world, said Rasha Salti, programmer at Arab film festivals. Although “Silences” wasn’t the first full-length film made by an Arab woman, “it has a visibility that outshines the achievements of others,” she said.
Moufida Ben Slimane was born on August 4, 1942 in Sidi Bou Said, a suburb of Tunis. Her father Ahmed worked as a decorative painter and craftsman in the palaces of the Tunisian nobility. Her mother Mongia was a housewife. Moufida, one of six children, looked after her younger siblings. As a teenager, she spent nights at a local movie theater watching Indian and Egyptian dramas.
She grew up in a time of social reform under the Tunisian President Habib Bourguiba, an advocate for women’s rights. In high school, Moufida’s philosophy teacher introduced her to the work of Ingmar Bergman and other European directors. In the mid-1960s she received a scholarship to the Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies in Paris. After graduating, she lived in France until 1972 and worked as a script supervisor.
In Tunisia, Ms. Tlatli was admired as a film editor and worked on classics of Arab cinema such as “Omar Gatlato” and “Halfaouine”. “Silences” was her debut as a director.
The theme of silence in the film is dramatized by the servant Khedija’s refusal to reveal her father’s identity to Alia. Alia never solves this riddle, but she sees a brutal reality: how her mother had quietly suffered from sexual ties to the two princes of the palace.
Silence is a hallmark of palace culture. During music lessons in the garden and at ballroom parties, aristocrats hold small talk and servants say nothing. Discretion means meekness. The same discretion, however, also veils the palace’s sexual violence and muzzles its victims. Servants learn to communicate with one another through grimaces or looks.
“All women follow the tradition of taboo, of silence, but the power of their looks is extraordinary,” said Ms. Tlatli in an interview with the British magazine Sight & Sound in 1995. “You had to get used to expressing yourself through their eyes.”
Ms. Tlatli discovered that this “culture of the indirect” was ideally suited to the medium of film.
“That’s why the camera is so amazing,” she said. “It is in complete harmony with this rather suppressed language. A camera is a bit smart and hidden. It’s there and can capture small details about something you’re trying to say. “
After “Silences”, Ms. Tlatli directed “The Season of Men” (2000), which also follows women of different generations who grapple with deeply rooted social customs. Her last film was “Nadia and Sarra” (2004).
In 2011, Ms. Tlatli was briefly Minister of Culture in the transitional government that took over Tunisia after the overthrow of the dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. “She has respect not only as a filmmaker and film editor, but also because she was not co-opted by the system,” said Ms. Salti, the film programmer.
In addition to her daughter, Ms. Tlatli survives her husband Mohamed Tlatli, a businessman involved in oil and gas exploration. a son, Walid; and five grandchildren.
Ms. Tlatli was inspired to make her own film after giving birth to Walid and leaving him with her mother according to Tunisian tradition, even though her mother already looked after four of her own sons. Her mother had been a “quiet woman” for a long time, Ms. Tlatli told The Guardian in 2001, before developing Alzheimer’s disease and losing her voice.
Her mother’s life has become “unbearable, exhausting, suffocating”.
Ms. Tlatli spent seven years outside of the film raising her children and helping her mother. The experience made her feel that there were unexamined gaps between women of different generations, similar to the one she portrayed in “Silences” between mother and daughter.
“I wanted to speak to her and it was too late,” she said in 1995 of her mother. “I projected all of this onto my daughter and thought: Maybe she didn’t feel close to me. That gave me the urgency to do this film. “
Lilia Blaise contributed to reporting from Tunis.
