The Life and Career of Moufida Tlatli
Typically, directors with “auteur” status tend to fit a specific mold, with a bias towards the white, male, American, European. Female filmmakers, in particular female filmmakers from the Arab world, are routinely overlooked, as if they haven’t been producing complex artistic works for decades now. To single out one Arab woman auteur is a strenuous task; as with all artist demographics, Arab women come from varied professional, religious and social backgrounds, and one woman’s filmography cannot be representative of all. Still, if a sole Arab female filmmaker must be identified, a pioneer whose films uniquely standout for their style and thematic elements, whose life, work and career deserves to be understood in depth to understand Arab women in cinema today, a true maestro—it would be Moufida Tlatli.
Born in 1947 in the coastal city of Sidi Bou Said, Tunisia, Tlatli developed her love for cinema as a teenager in high school, frequently attending showings at her philosophy teacher’s film club. She graduated from the French Institute of Cinema (IDHEC) in Paris in 1968, after which she worked as a script editor and production manager for French television. In 1972 she returned to Tunisia, making a name for herself in the North African film industry as an editor. For two decades, Tlatli worked with the region’s most notable auteurs, editing films such as Wanderers of the Desert, Fatma 75 and Halfaouine: Boy of the Terraces (Tunisia) Omar Gatlato and Nahla (Algeria), A Door to the Sky (Morocco) and Fertile Memory (Palestine). Several of these films were helmed by first-time directors; it was well known that Tlatli, with her experience and innate skill, could swiftly adapt to the vision of each project, stitching any film into an intricate mosaic.
The years Tlatli spent as an editor allowed her to develop an intimate understanding of the prominent themes and interests of Arab filmmakers: “I’ve worked with several male and two female directors and I’ve noticed that they share a common interest in the condition of Arabic women,” stated Tlatli in a 1995 Sight and Sound interview. “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 kinds of liberation. It was like a litmus test for Arab society: if one could discuss the liberation of women then 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.”
It wasn’t until 1994 that Tlatli, then in her late 40s and a seasoned veteran in the industry, comfortably took a seat in the director’s chair for her debut feature, The Silences of the Palace. After the death of a prince in 1965, 25-year-old lounge singer Alia returns to the palace where she was born into servitude. There, she recalls her buried childhood, confronting the memory of her mother, who lived as a servant and mistress, and the fallen royal who may or may not have been her father. Once fated to follow in her mother’s footsteps, the girl fled the palace with a young revolutionary—yet the now-pregnant adult Alia still finds herself disillusioned and polarized because of her gender, despite the nation’s new independence. Silences premiered at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival, receiving a Caméra d'Or Special Mention for best first film, and the Critic’s Prize at the Toronto International Film Festival. It is widely considered to be one of the best Arab films of all time.
After so many years working as an essential yet invisible crew member, what was it that finally pushed Tlatli to helm her first feature film? To Écrans d’Afrique in 1994, she explained: “This film was born out of absolute necessity, even dramatically, as it is linked to the sudden and serious illness of my mother. I realized then that we didn’t know very much about her because, like many people of her generation, she didn’t talk about herself, her past, her ordeals and the constraints associated with her being a woman. I wanted to know more about this problem beyond the experience of my own family.” In Télérama that year, she said: “Since adolescence I had been struck by the silence of Arab women. A painful silence that I didn’t understand. When she reaches puberty, the Arab girl sees herself regarded with fear by her family and her environment. She becomes an object to be married off as quickly as possible. If she loses her virginity before marriage, she is dishonored and she dishonors her family. The worst thing of all is that all these threats remain unarticulated.”
Thus, a story about the intergenerational trauma of women was born, along with its congruous title, The Silences of the Palace. As the ghosts of Alia’s past appear, their pain and suffering are felt, but never given voice. Instead, the eyes speak: a lingering gaze, a symbolic gesture. Young Alia and her mother sat in front of a mirror, the daughter applying the mother’s lipstick; nothing is stated explicitly, but the girl’s coming-of-age is conveyed, and the mother’s fears hang in the balance. It was one of the first, and certainly the most notable, instances where this nuanced perspective was shown through the lens of a female Arab filmmaker; her irrevocable, personal ties to the women of her culture allowed her to construct a film that spoke volumes in the quietest of frames.
Tlatli also wrote and edited the film, delicately crafting each scene, particularly making deft use of the long take. “As someone who works as an editor, I was worried that the way I was filming would not be acceptable to Western audiences, which are completely attuned to a western rhythm that is extremely fast and quite different from ours,” she said to Sight and Sound. “But I was interested in the bodies of women who move, and work, with all the time in the world. The women, the servants who work in the palace, have the whole day to do the cooking, to wash and to iron. I couldn’t allow myself to show them in an ‘efficient’ montage, which would be false, because the content and the form would not correspond. I had to show them in their own rhythm, in their own way of living and breathing. I had to show the slowness of their lives through my use of the camera.”
Following the critical acclaim of her first feature, Tlatli hoped to return to film editing—but traditional montage was on its way out, and she didn’t feel she “had the energy to learn a new technique.” Her next feature came in 2000, titled The Season of Men. Told seamlessly in a non-linear fashion, The Season of Men continues where Silences left off, both thematically and stylistically. The film follows Aïcha, living with her mother-in-law on the island of Djerba while her husband works in Tunis. One month out of the year he comes to visit; this short time is the season of men. We see Aïcha give birth to her two daughters, obsessively weaving rugs in the hopes of selling them in the capital, silently defying her mother-in-law’s strict traditional authority, waiting restlessly month by month for the return of her husband. She is only permitted to leave the clutches of her mother-in-law when she gives birth to a boy. Life in Tunis, however, doesn’t get any simpler, and the struggles she faces circles back around to her daughters, in an endless loop. The film premiered in the Un Certain Regard category at Cannes, and once again received critical acclaim.
Speaking at the Montpellier Mediterranean Film Festival in 2001, Tlatli revealed that the driving force for her second film was her daughter’s adolescence. “Her relationship to her body and to her sexuality, the problem of virginity all posed sharp questions for me. I wanted to talk about all these things, having myself been raised in the same way as my mother, within a very powerful tradition, particularly with regard to virginity. My daughter’s generation, which I hoped was much freer in spirit than ours had been, did not turn out to be all that free," she said. “Before my daughter left to study in Paris, I realized that we hadn’t yet broached the subject. I told her, as my mother had done when I was her age, to ‘look out for herself.’ This sentence had instilled such a sense of guilt in me in my relations with men that I repeated the same thing with my daughter. That’s why I wrote my second film for her.”
Tlatli re-utilizes her contemplative long takes, this time on the ensemble of Djerban women as they live under the thumb of their matriarch. We again enter the intimate world of looks and gestures: in the confines of the house, or in the shallow waters of the sea, the women are almost always together, bottling up their longings and sexual desires until their distant and detached husbands arrive. Aicha’s two daughters observe, absorb and internalize their behavior, developing diverting understandings of what womanhood is supposed to be. Of the complicated relationship between the female characters in the film, Tlatli said to Africultures in 2000: “…you realize that the preparations [for the season of men] are more important than the reunion, thanks to this solidarity between the women who have to support one another because they all suffer the same fate. What I wanted to convey is that the women are very much responsible for this heritage in spite of themselves. They hand it on from daughter to daughter, and if they don’t decide to stop it one day, it will never end.”
Three years after The Season of Men came 2003’s Nadia and Sarra, which proved to be Tlatli’s final directorial effort. Tlatli wrote, produced and directed the drama—however, limited information is available about the production of this film, and it remains widely underseen. To speculate based on the production processes of her previous two works, the themes of Nadia and Sarra could have been extracted from feelings or experiences she was having in her own life, that she wanted to bring to the big screen. Forty-seven year old Nadia is a professor at Tunis University, with a beautiful 18 year old daughter named Sarra. Nadia finds herself at a crossroads as she approaches middle age, with the realization that her daughter has just entered the height of her desirability, while hers has begun to decline. Her relationship with Sarra, her husband, and those around her deteriorates as Nadia’s behavior becomes more and more erratic, horrified by the prospect that she has lost all that made her a ‘real woman’.
The dialogue in Nadia and Sarra is almost entirely in French, unlike her previous two films that feature Tunisian Arabic. But the devil is in the details: Nadia, in her most vulnerable moments, speaks Arabic only to her housekeeper, or her very close friends. The modern setting and casual dress code doesn’t get in the way of Tlatli’s signature measured camera, which takes its time with Nadia as she tries on a new dress, is unable to get out of bed, bursts into tears, or tries to doll herself up, her attitude and depression only worsening. Her rocky relationship with her daughter is filled with melodrama, but still manages to feel real and familiar, with the now-crossover star Hiam Abbass revealing fragile emotion even through the subtlest of gestures.
With her third feature, Tlatli’s filmmaking career would come to a close. After the Tunisian Revolution in 2011, she was briefly appointed as the Minister of Culture by the interim government, but otherwise lived out a private life with her family in her home country. She passed away on February 7, 2021 at the age of 73, after complications from COVID-19, survived by her husband, children and grandchildren.
Without a doubt, Moufida Tlatli has left behind a significant legacy in both Arab and feminist cinema. A master of montage, she used her ability to embroider complicated yet heartened love letters to Tunisia and to Tunisian women—the women stuck between desire and reality, who struggle to achieve personal sovereignty, from adolescence to old age. Such themes speak directly to Tunisian and Arab women, yes, but are still deeply relevant to all women in modern societies; her feminist message is rich and timeless. To this day, however, Tlatli’s masterpieces have not received restorations, and are not easily found or accessible. For the 5th annual Arab Women in the Arts showcase, running from July 22-27, all three of Tlatli’s films will be screened in New York City and available to stream online in North America; The Silences of the Palace will screen in San Francisco on July 23rd.