Tlatli, Moufida
(1947–)

Tunisian film director Moufida Tlatli is one of the foremost female filmmakers of the Arab world. Trained in Paris at the famous Institut des hautes études cinématographiques (IDHEC) film school, Tlatli became the top film editor in the Middle East, editing over twenty major productions from the 1970s until the 1990s. In 1994 she directed her first feature-length film, The Silences of the Palace (Samt al-Qusur), and earned international acclaim. She continued her feature filmmaking with The Season of Men (2000) and Nadia et Sarra (2003), and has received widespread critical attention for her explorations of women's issues in Tunisian society.

PERSONAL HISTORY

Tlatli was born in 1947 in the village of Sidi Bou Said, in the north of Tunisia. While she was brought up in a traditional milieu, she came of age in the era of the Tunisian struggle for independence from France. Tlatli belongs to the generation of president Habib Bourguiba, who upon independence in 1956 introduced a secular regime and brought about major reforms for women—abolishing polygamy, establishing civil marriage, and granting women divorce, voting, and abortion rights—giving Tunisia the unique status it has in the Arab world today for its advancement of women's rights.

In her adolescence during these early years of Tunisian independence, Tlatli discovered her passion for cinema. In the ciné-club run by her high school philosophy teacher, she was exposed to the films of Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Roberto Rosellini, and of the existentialist tradition, which opened her eyes to a cinematic world beyond the Egyptian and Hindu films of her youth. She chose to pursue a career in cinema and in 1965 left for Paris to study at the famous IDHEC film school. She had arrived in Paris at a moment often referred to as the golden age of cinema, and her repertoire of viewings included works of Italian neo-realist cinema, the French New Wave, Brazilian cinema novo, Polish cinema, and films of the Prague Spring. For a young woman in the mid-1960s, however, film directing and production were not considered options of study; women at this time were steered toward training to become either script supervisors, then called script girls, or film editors. Tlatli thus completed her degree in film editing in 1968. Remaining in Paris for four years, she worked as a script supervisor and production director at the former office of French public radio and television, the Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française (ORTF), now divided into seven institutions.

In 1972 Tlatli returned to Tunisia and started her career as a film editor, a job that spanned twenty-two years and placed her name in the credits of many of the major film productions of the Arab world, including Merzak Allouache's Omar Gatlato (1976), Michel Khleifi's Fertile Memory (1980), Canticle of the Stones (1990), Nacer Khemir's The Wanderer (1985), and Férid Boughedir's Halfaouine, Boy of the Terraces (1995). A recipient of several prizes at the Festivals of Catharge and Ouagadougou for her editing, she gained prominence in the field and became recognized as one of the most sought-after film editors in the Arab world.

Work as an editor was rewarding for Tlatli. She has stated that she appreciated working alongside a director; she learned and made progress through the films of others. In a 2000 interview in L'Humanité with Michòle Levieux, she described it as being in her "temperament to be of service to the universe of an other, to accompany him or her, and to invest [herself] in his or her world." As a film editor, she had the opportunity to work collaboratively with the major Arab filmmakers from the 1970s to 1990s. Director Férid Boughedir commented on the mark Tlatli has made on an entire generation of cinema, stating:

"When Moufida Tlatli was an editor, she was both big sister and mother to most of the Arab cinema 'young wave.' It is an understatement to say that she adopted our films: she literally poured her heart into them, inspiring the most hesitant with her creative vigor. We were all waiting for this overabundance of sensitivity, generosity and talent to come to fruition in a film of her own" (Films du Losange, dossier de presse).

Tlatli's passage from editing to directing films of her own followed a period of difficult personal circumstances. Creative and demanding, she traveled across the Arab world and often to Paris for postproduction work. According to custom, after giving birth to her first child she had her mother come to help with childrearing. Soon after, her mother became ill and was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. Tlatli took seven years off from her film career to take care of her mother and two children. Witnessing her mother's descent into mutism devastated her, and led her to raise questions about her mother's life and the gap between their generations. Her mother's absolute silence in later life filled Tlatli with the desire to understand all that remained unsaid about her mother's plight—and more generally, the culture of silence that characterizes women's experience in Tunisian society that has been transmitted from one generation to another. These questions took on urgency for Tlatli and compelled her to make her first feature-length film, The Silences of the Palace, which was released in 1994.

Though Silences of the Palace takes its inspiration from the life of Tlatli's mother, it is not strictly autobiographical. Its setting is a palace of the ruling Bey under the French protectorate at the height of the Tunisian struggle for independence, and it deals with the lives of four generations of women servants. A coming of age story of Alia, the illegitimate daughter of a woman whose life has been spent in domestic—and sexual—servitude to the princes of the palace, it is told in flashbacks and focuses on the years immediately preceding and following Tunisian independence in 1956. Although Alia's departure from the palace with her revolutionary boyfriend and her pursuit of a career as a singer presumably represents an escape from the servitude suffered by the previous generations, her life portrayed ten years later nonetheless raises pertinent questions about the status of women and class in Tunisia, even in the wake of independence and the legal reforms it brought about for women.

BIOGRAPHICAL HIGHLIGHTS

Name: Moufida Tlatli

Birth: 1947, Sidi Bou Saïd, Tunisia

Family: Married; one daughter, one son

Nationality: Tunisian

Education: Diploma from IDHEC film school, 1968

PERSONAL CHRONOLOGY:

• 1968–1972: Script supervisor, production director at the former ORTF in Paris
• 1970s–1990s: Film editor for more than twenty major cinema productions of the Arab world, including Merzak Allouache (Omar Gatlato, 1976), Michel Khleifi (Fertile Memory, 1980; Canticle of the Stones, 1990), Nacer Khemir (The Wanderer, 1985), and Férid Boughedir (Halfaouine, Boy of the Terraces, 1995)
• 1994: Directs The Silences of the Palace (Samt el qusur)
• 2000: The Season of Men (La saison des hommes)
• 2004: Nadia et Sarra

Upon its release, Tlatli's film was met with major international acclaim at film festivals throughout the world. It was selected for the Directors Fortnight at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival, and it won a Special Mention for the Caméra d'Or award. In addition, it won the International Critics' Award at the 1994 Toronto International Film Festival, the Satyajit Ray Prize at the 1994 San Francisco Film Festival, and the Golden Tulip at the 1994 Istanbul International Film Festival. Tlatli was also awarded the prize for Best Director at the 1995 All African Film Awards.

Following on the heels of her successful debut feature film, Tlatli continued exploring the nature of oppression still faced by women in Tunisian society in her second feature, The Season of Men (La saison des hommes), released in 2000. Set on the island of Djerba off the southeast coast of Tunisia, the film focuses on a community of women who wait eleven months of the year for their trader husbands to return from working on the mainland to spend a season with their wives. Tlatli portrays the alienation, solitude, and frustration of the female protagonists for whom the island is similar to a prison, where the male-dominated social structure is perpetuated by custom even in the absence of men. Whereas Tlatli's Silences of The Palace was a means of coming to terms with her mother's generation, The Season of Men is a film for the generation of her daughter, as the filmmaker expressed in a 2000 interview with Olivier Barlet. The challenges confronting protagonists Aïcha and her companion Zeineb in the face of traditional codes of behavior are just as present for Aïcha's daughters Emna and Meriem, who must still tackle the forces of oppression from within. In this largely male-free space, where solidarity and complicity characterize many of women's relationships, Tlatli aims to raise awareness of the extent to which women are responsible for transmitting patriarchal oppression in spite of themselves, and suggests that women have a share of responsibility for this heritage.

The Season of Men was widely presented at film festivals throughout 2000 and 2001. It was an Official Selection of Un Certain Regard at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival. At the Paris Biennale of Arab Cinema in 2000, it was winner of the Institut du Monde Arabe Grand Prize. It also received awards and nominations at other film festivals including Namur and Cologne.

In 2003, Tlatli completed her third feature-length film, Nadia et Sarra. Autobiographical in inspiration, it is the fictive portrayal of the relationship between a forty-seven-year-old literature teacher, Nadia, caught in depression at the approach of menopause, and her eighteen-year-old daughter Sarra. In an interview with ARTE, Tlatli stated her desire to deal with the topic of menopause, which is universal yet so rarely explored. Tlatli's camera plays upon the mirror images of mother and daughter, as Nadia lives this stage of life as a violent shattering of her self-image and the loss of that which constitutes her womanhood. In setting this story within the context of her country, Tlatli aims to unveil the face of modern Tunisia, which has seen the legal emancipation of women but remains under the weight of its traditional past.

INFLUENCES AND CONTRIBUTIONS

Tlatli's first influences can be traced to the social climate in which she was raised, and the period of change which transformed her country and helped shape her education. As the eldest child in a family of six children, she was close to her mother and versed in the traditions and values that were espoused by women prior to Tunisian independence. Yet she was also of the first generation to come of age under the presidency of Bourguiba, and the program of women's reforms and social innovation that he launched in the late 1950s. Education was privileged under this administration, and Tlatli's acceptance into the prestigious IDHEC film school in Paris could undoubtedly be seen as a successful realization of doors that were opened at this time.

In interviews, Tlatli has evoked her early exposure to Egyptian and Hindu cinema, yet she cites that her main inspiration can be traced to the European cinematic traditions of the 1950s and 1960s, including Italian neo-realism and the French New Wave. Her studies in Paris—which were concluded at the time of the student protests and events of 1968—and work in Paris until the early 1970s were certainly formative experiences at a radical time for shaping thought on art and social change in an international context. Her French-based training in editing techniques became essential for her work with the new generation of emergent cinema in the Arab world.

THE CONDITION OF ARAB WOMEN

Through my work as an editor, I have close contact with the contemporary preoccupations of Arabic cinema. I've worked with several male and two female directors and I've noticed that they share a common interest in the condition of Arab women. I often wondered why it was that male directors should be so preoccupied with the question of women, until I realized that, for them, woman was the symbol of freedom of expression, and of all types of liberation. It was like a litmus test for Arab society: if one could discuss other freedoms. Most likely there would not be that much freedom of expression, and most likely they could not speak freely about political problems, but the question of women could still be discussed. I think that each country in the Maghreb [i.e. North Africa] tends to take up particular themes and their theme of women's liberation is the one that has been special to Tunisia.

            FROM AN INTERVIEW WITH LAURA MULVEY, "MOVING BODIES" 18.

Rejecting the stylistic and thematic premises of the escapist industry of Egyptian cinema, Arab directors of this new wave sought to create an original cinema that would represent the social realities of their nations. This social realism offers a countering view to portrayals of Arab locales as exotic sites in Western films, especially in the Hollywood tradition. Directors with whom Tlatli worked, such as Merzak Allouache, Nacer Khemir, and Férid Boughedir, made films that focused on such controversial social themes as urban alienation and gender taboos. Narratives were extremely personal and often took the form of the coming-of-age genre. In the quest for uncovering the experience of truth, documentary techniques were occasionally employed. These directors often sought new ways of storytelling by drawing on Arab traditional sources and bringing innovation to more Western-developed cinematic narrative forms. Stylistically, Arab new wave directors brought technical refinement to their work, privileging the image and sound over words.

Silences of the Palace in many respects is a crowning success of Arab new wave cinema or Cinema Jedid, carrying out its ideals thematically, formally, and stylistically. It takes up the issue of anticolonial struggle addressed in the previous generation of Maghribi (North African) cinema, but focuses on its potential impact on several generations of women who live in a cloistered sphere of domestic servitude. News of Tunisian struggle for independence only filters through the walls of the castle through the radio and visitors from the outside, and through scenes depicting the ruling Bey in discussion. The uprising outside the walls—and off scene—seems to barely touch the conditions of women of this class. Tlatli thus forays into issues of feminine experience such as physical violence, slavery, rape, abortion, mental illness, and death that have persisted in silence beyond the passage to independence and the passing of Tunisia's Personal Status Code of 1957. As the coming of age of protagonist Alia is witnessed through flashback scenes that are recollected as she walks through the castle ten years following her departure, the weight of her suffering is palpable, and one wonders whether she has succeeded in leaving behind the past and her nameless origins that bound her to the castle and the community of women who raised her. Tlatli raises the question about whether change in the context of the new Tunisian nation is possible, and whether there are hurdles to still clear with regards to class and gender despite the new reforms that presumably touch the lives of all women.

Tlatli thus succeeds in taking the viewer on a brazenly realistic tour of the cloistered sphere of the Orientalist harem, and this is due to a number of stylistic innovations. While she seems to replicate the palette of color that might evoke Eugène Delacroix's famous 1834 painting of the Women of Algiers in their Harem—and she does not refrain from what could be idealized scenes depicting convivial women performing kitchen labor and traditional healing ceremonies—she underscores the silences which traverse the women's joyful songs, and visually captures the silences that reveal the women's complicity in the face of the unspeakable subjugation they must endure. The rule of silence that permeates the visual and dialogic texture of the film is only punctuated by Alia's voice and her performance of songs by Egyptian singer umm kulthum and ultimately the nationalists' anthem that give expression to her aspirations for liberty.

Just as the film uses realism to repudiate Orientalist representations of cloistered North African women, Tlatli also emphasizes ways in which her film resists other Western filmmaking techniques. She uses longer shots to produce a slower pace, to avoid giving in to a Western sense of time. The staging of the film, including decor and settings, are also significant, and work to draw the viewer's attention to distinctively Arabic patterns, colors, and textiles. For Tlatli, rhythm, colors, and gestures all combine to create what she refers to as the poetry of the film that gives a fantastic freedom: in the Arabic tradition the use of symbols and metaphors allows for the expression of the unspoken. These formal and stylistic techniques let Tlatli comment on what is forbidden or unspoken in her culture through signs that nonetheless have meaning within and beyond the Arab world. In this respect, her work touches on the universal, and Silences of the Palace can be credited with helping to bring new Arab cinema to a wider international audience.

Tlatli's subsequent films both make use of innovative subject matter and techniques to address a wider audience. In her second film, The Season of Men, Tlatli focuses on a distinctive Maghribi cultural space, the communities of women on the island of Djerba that live eleven months of the year without their husbands. Yet this isolated space—similar to the castle in Silences—raises larger and even universal questions about the roles women play themselves in perpetuating oppressive traditions: this world portrayed may essentially be free of men, but not of oppression. Tlatli's film thus suggests ways in which women are unable to liberate themselves from mentalities which are nonetheless out of step with the laws and social discourses of the changing times: There are many ways in which the past needs to be continuously confronted in the present. Hence, her most recent film, Nadia et Sarra, takes up the universal subject of menopause, as experienced by an urban middle-class Tunisian woman. The change of life that the new woman of modern liberated Tunisia undergoes also requires a coming to terms with the generations of the past. For Tlatli, even today's woman—and ultimately her successive generations—needs to constantly reassess and redress her image of herself in her social context.

THE WORLD'S PERSPECTIVE

Since the release of Silences of the Palace, Tlatli has earned prominent international notoriety as a filmmaker and advocate of women's issues in the Islamic Arab world. Silences of the Palace has been hailed as a masterpiece and has gone on to become the most widely distributed North African film, and, as pointed out by critic Suzanne Gauch, even was featured in Time magazine's list of top ten films of 1994 (though in contrast, The Season of Men and Nadia et Sarra have as of 2007 not yet had North American distribution). For over a decade, her works have been presented at film festivals throughout the world and have earned awards and recognition, establishing Tlatli as a top Arab filmmaker.

Silences of the Palace is now taught regularly as part of U.S. university curriculum in Arab and Francophone studies, postcolonialism, international film studies, and women's studies. Tlatli has been aligned with such Arab women intellectuals as assia djebar and fatima mernissi, whose works raise consciousness about the conditions of women in the Arab world and give voice to women's experiences and their quest for agency in the face of male oppression, colonialism, and in the context of the heated social and political issues at stake in the early twenty-first century. Tlatli has thus earned a solid place within the context of international feminism.

Scholarly interest in Tlatli's work straddles three areas. The first preoccupation has largely focused on representations of colonial and postcolonial female subjectivity. Notably, critic Dorit Naaman offers a psychoanalytic-tinted analysis of Alia's complex struggle in The Silences of the Palace to gain access to the symbolic—and social—order through not only her voice, but through embracing her body and maternal genealogy.

A second area of scholarship enlists Tlatli's work in a critique of nationhood. Film scholar Ella Shohat has included Silences of the Palace in a category of works that she terms post-Third-Worldist, because it contains a feminist critique of the extent to which anticolonial nationalism "disappointed hopes for women's empowerment." The analysis and activism that emerge in Tlatli's work, focusing on the intersection of nation, race, class, and gender, produce "an open-ended narrative far from the euphoric closure of the nation" (Shohat).

Finally, a third focus on Tlatli's work examines the formal strategies she makes use of in her filmmaking. Most recently, a chapter in Gauch's recent book Liberating Sharazad: Feminism, Postcolonialism, and Islam looks at how Tlatli deploys non-Western, distinctively Arab formal structures of narrative art from the Thousand and One Nights in The Silences of the Palace. Drawing on devices from the Nights that evoke a potential for change, Gauch argues that the narrative of the film sways its audience and challenges the status quo of the dominant social structures her protagonist and storyteller Alia seeks to exit.

LEGACY

Since Tlatli is still gaining momentum and renown as a filmmaker, it remains too early to assess her ultimate legacy. Greater international dissemination of her recent feature films will certainly generate more a comprehensive assessment of her body of work on the status of women in modern Tunisian society and her complex exploration of the relationships between the past, present, and future generations of women. The near future will undoubtedly see the emergence of a young generation of filmmakers marked by the passion and vision of her work that brought to cinematic consciousness the hidden corridors of women's silences that certainly are resonant throughout and beyond the Arab world.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barbancey, Pierre. "Le Silence des Tunisiennes." Le Web de L'Humanité. 20 May 1994. Available from http://www.humanite.fr/.

Barlet, Olivier. "Interview with Moufida Tlatli." Africultures. May 2000. Available from http://www.africultures.com/.

"Director Profile: Moufida Tlatli Showcases the Inner World of Women's Emancipation." Magharebia: The News and Views of the Maghreb. 3 March 2005. Available from http://www.magharebia.com/.

Films du Losange and Maghrebfilms Carthage. "La Saison des Hommes (The Season of Men): Dossier de Presse." Les Films du Losange. Available from http://www.filmsdulosange.fr/.

Gauch, Suzanne. Liberating Sharazad: Feminism, Postcolonialism, and Islam. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

Génin, Bernard. "Télérama: Les Silences du Palais." Film Club de Cannes. 21 December 2000. Available from http://www.filmclubcannes.com/.

Khannous, Touria. "Strategies of Representation and Postcolonial Identity in North African Women's Cinema." Journal X: A Journal in Culture and Criticism 6 (2001): 47-61.

Lennon, Peter. "Sins of the Mothers." Guardian Unlimited. 22 June 2001. Available from http://arts.guardian.co.uk/.

Levieux, Michòle. "La Sexualité est le Fondement Même de l'Equilibre Humain." Le Web de L'Humanité. 27 December 2000. Available from http://www.humanite.fr/.

Martin, Florence. "Silence and Scream: Moufida Tlatli's Cinematic Suite." Studies in French Cinema 4.3 (2004): 175-185.

"Moufida Tlatli: Director Profile." Festival de Cannes. 18 June 2007. Available from http://www.festival-cannes.org/.

"Moufida Tlatli-réalisatrice." ARTE. Updated 7 June 2006. 18 June 2007. Available from http://www.arte.tv/fr/.

Mulvey, Laura. "Moving Bodies: Interview with Moufida Tlatli." Sight and Sound 5 (1995): 18-20.

Naaman, Dorit. "Woman/Nation: A Postcolonial Look at Female Subjectivity." Quarterly Review of Film and Video 17 (2000): 333-342.

Sherzer, Dina. "Remembrance of Things Past: Les silences du palais by Moufida Tlatli." South Central Review 17 (2000): 50-59.

Shohat, Ella. "Framing Post-Third-Worldist Culture: Gender and Nation in Middle Eastern/North African Film and Video." Jouvert: Journal of Postcolonial Studies 1 (1997).

Simarski, Lynn Teo. "Through North African Eyes." Saudi Aramco World. 43 (Jan./Feb. 1992): 30-35.

                                          Nadia Sahely