Les Silences du Palais (The Silences of the Palace) made a very strong impact on everyone and drew over 200 000 viewers in France. This second film, which is guided by the doubts and questions of her own teenage daughter, develops Moufida Tlatli’s own autobiographical reflection. It is full of magnificent and moving scenes, such as the one where the women wash their henna in the sea as they discuss the men they await for eleven months of the year. The men are in Tunis running their shops, the women in Djerba waiting for their one-month holiday, the season of the men… But their arrival only brings disappointment. « The men do not age, only the women enjoy that privilege. » Women who are trapped between the confinement of the enclosed places in which they wait, and their desire for men, for these men who remain what they are… Moufida Tlatli subtly captures both the complicity and solidarity of the women and the troubles which confront them with their own desire for other men, another life, another place, to break out of the norm… A montage which spirals between the painful memories of yesterday and today’s refusal, between the mother and her two daughters, a montage of the unspoken and glances, gestures and silences, a montage of sensual bodies, cloth, and this water symbol of life… A profoundly feminine film, a painful but determined call, far from partisan slogans, to take life differently.
