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Set in 1950s Tunisia, the film is about a 25-year-old woman, Alia, who returns to her place of birth—a prince's palace in which her mother, Khedija, worked as a house servant and mistress. Alia had fled the palace ten years earlier, at which time she spent burying totured memories of her childhood. In her visit to pay respects for the death of the prince, Alia wanders through the largely abandoned palace where she is confronted by these memories represented as detailed flashbacks of her childhood. She begins to piece together a narrative about her mother's sexuality and sexual exploitation in a space ordered by gender and class difference, and against the backdrop of her persistant questioning about her father's identity. As Alia negotiates her past, she also deals with her current relationship to her lover, Lotfi, who has asked her to have what seems to be yet another abortion. Her development throughout the course of the film is brought about by her awakening to a past of sexual and social servitude which many of the female servants experienced in the palace against her own contested independence fraught with pain, conflict and uncertainty. It also becomes clear that Alia was the unclaimed daughter of the deceased prince, something that her mother had guarded till her own death at the end of the film

The Silences of the Palace (صمت القصور, Samt el qusur) is a 1994 Tunisian film co-written and directed by Moufida Tlatli. Investigating feminist issues in the Arab world, the film looks at i

Tlatli wrote the film in response to her own mother's sudden severe illness and her subsequent realization of how little she knew.

The film presents a complelling narrative about female sexual and social servitude against the backdrop of a palace that has fallen into decay

Lisa Nakamura is a Gwendolyn Calvert Baker Collegiate Professor of American Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

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