Moufida Tlatli, the director of one of my favourite films, The Silences of the Palace, passed away. The director and her works aren’t well known outside the Arab region and not seen by enough people within the region.

I’m always sad by the lack of inclusion and knowledge of great films by Arab filmmakers when it comes to discussions, writings, retrospectives. Part of the reason I think is the lack of accessibility of these films to a wider audience. There are many pirated versions of these films found online, and Rotana owns a big bulk of Egyptian classic cinema which are mostly shown on TV with no interest to show them in cinemas (in festivals, special retrospectives, etc.) or release them on DVD/Blu-Ray (like we see with the likes of Criterion, Arrow, Radiance).

In 2013, the now defunct Dubai International Film Festival compiled a list of 100 Arab Films voted by filmmakers and critics (including me) which you can find here (sadly the festival’s website and archive has disappeared online). A book titled Cinema of Passion was also published which included “an overall critical study of the full list by its editor, film critic Ziad Abdullah. Analyses of each film are given by 20 renowned Arab film critics, in both English and Arabic, to give historical context, background and depth.”

The Silences of the Palace landed at number 5, and sadly I’ve only watched a poor copy of it on Youtube. I hope one day I can watch it in a cinema, either on a 35mm print or a restored version.

Sight and Sound published a conversation between Laura Mulvey and Moufida Tlatli from 1995 after the news of Tlatli’s death, and it is essential reading about her and her debut film The Silences of the Palace.

The following is from a Twitter thread posted by Another Gaze.

Translation of an extract of the tribute left on Facebook by Hatem Bourial and Soraya Tee: “Born in 1947, Moufida Tlatli leaves us two masterpieces as well as a surreptitious but essential trace on almost all of two decades of Tunisian filmography.
From 1972, the date of her return to Tunisia after studying at the DHEC in Paris, until the threshold of the 1990s, she was the editor par excellence of the most innovative Tunisian cinema of her time.
It was an unwritten rule in Tunisian cinema that every first-time director would hanker over the idea of having Moufida Tlatli at the editing table. She knew better than anyone how to bring out the rhythm of a work from beneath a tangle of rushes.
It was in 1994 that Moufida Tlatli naturally and resolutely turned towards directing. With ‘Les Silences du palais’, which she also wrote and edited, she created a deliciously sensitive film. The character of Alia is a powerful mould for the female figure throughout Tunisian cinema […] Moufida Tlatli kept up momentum with her second feature, ‘The Season of Men’, in 2000.
A great public and critical reception accompanied the film which Tlatli chose not to edit herself. The heartbreaks of Aïcha, the film’s protagonist, are in-line with Tlatli’s broadly feminist approach (but in the impressionistic sense of the term: the art of plunging into the changing reflection of a woman grappling with the world).
Since 2011, after the Revolution and a short-lived appointment at the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, Tlatli has worked very little, instead dreaming up a saraband of images and cultivating her garden. She has left us at the age of 74, leaving a vivid mark on the many Arab and African films she has edited, including two films which are not yet complete.
May she rest in peace. Her posterity will take on the shape of an unchanging smile and the form of many kilometres of film: images in perpetual motion that tell us about Tunisia, its eternal seasons, its momentary silences, its palaces that rustle with secrets and its men and women who find themselves in a struggle between reality, their unconscious and a desire to live freely.”

RIP Moufida Tlatli (August 4, 1947 - February 7, 2021).