Les Silences du Palais

Et puisque nous sommes dans Genre & Cinéma voici un petit extrait et une petite note en anglais sur le film de la réalisatrice tunisienne Moufida Tlatli, Samt al-Qusur de 1994.

Synopsis: Une jeune femme, Alia, parcourt un palais en ruines dans la banlieue de Tunis et se souvient de ses quinze ans, lorsque sa mère, Khedija, était en ce même lieu une servante du bey. Alia découvrait alors deux mondes : celui des maîtres, les nantis, et celui des servantes, les corvéables...

Note: In Silences of the Palace, Moufida Tlatli’s first feature film, the filmmaker provides us with an insight into both the past life of women during the colonial and the early independence periods and what might be their life situation in contemporary Tunisia. Indeed, as we see the past through Tlatl's eyes and lens we see the past as she sees it from her position as a 90's Tunisian woman. This lets us appreciate the continuity which exists between three periods: the colonial one, the independence one and, in a more subtle way, the 80s and 90s one through Tlatli’s project. In other words, it sheds light into the continuities and maybe the discontinuities between three generations of women which are revealed to us through two mains ideas: the learning and the transmission that are here experienced in a deafening silence. As Moufida Tlatli lets clear in one of her interviews titled “Parce que je suis d’abord femme” is her wiling to examine “the silences that surround us in our daily life”.
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