In the framework of the Focus country: Tunisia, this afternoon at 7 pm, Casa Árabe de Madrid is screening the film Los silencios del palacio, by the Tunisian director Moufida Tlatli. The entries are numbered. Projection in original version subtitled in Spanish (VOSE).
The screening, organized in collaboration with the Ministry of Cultural Affairs of Tunisia and the Tunisian Embassy, is intended to be a tribute to the filmmaker Moufida Tlatli (1947-2021).
Casa Árabe will include in the first half of 2025 several appointments with some cinematic milestones of the North African country. This feature film, with music by Anouar Brahem and the performance of actress Hend Sabry, received in 1994 the “International Critic” Award at the Toronto International Film Festival as well as the Golden Chamber Award at the Cannes Film Festival, the Golden Tanit of the Carthage Film Festival, the Sutherland Trophy of the British Film Institute and the Golden Tulip of the Istanbul International Film Festival. Subsequently, in September 2012, director and film critic Mark Cousins named it one of Africa’s ten best films.
The palace silences tells how, at 25 years old, the young Alia is determined to break with everything: with her job as a wedding singer and with her partner, Lotfi, a man with whom she has lived for ten years, but who forces her to get rid of the child she is expecting. Faced with a new situation, she will return to the memory of her childhood, to the palace where she grew up together with her mother, a maid, and to the evocation of an unknown father, who may well have been the prince owner of that palace…
The first feature film by Tunisian director Moufida Tatli (which was also the first female-directed film in the Arab world) is a fabulous window into life in palaces before Tunisia achieved its independence from France, in 1956, as well as the status of women and servitude in the Arab world and the healing power of music. Tickets can be purchased at this link.
