Moufida Tlatli

1947 -

Tunisian film director, editor, and screenwriter.

Moufida Tlatli was born in 1947 in picturesque Sidi Bou Said, Tunisia. Following her graduation from the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques (IDHEC) in Paris, Tlatli worked as a writer and production manager for the Office de la RadiodiffusionTélévision Française (ORTF) from 1968 to 1972. Returning to Tunisia, Tlatli edited and wrote screenplays for a number of important Arab films, such as Allouache's Omar Gatlato, Ben Ammar's Aziza, Louhichi's L'ombre de la terre, and Boughedir's Halfaouine. Tlatli's own award-winning first film, Les Silences du palais (Samt al Qusur, 1994), which takes place on the eve of independence from the French in the 1950s, traces the systemic and internalized oppression suffered by generations of servant women working in the kitchens of the Bey's relatives. Like Silences, Tlatli's second film, La saison des hommes (2000), set on the island of Djerba, focuses on mothers and daughters confronting patriarchal traditions, now exacerbated by economic pressures that have made their husbands internal migrants who come home one month a year. Tlatli's rich, sensuous imagery, slow rhythms, and retrospective narrative structures translate unspoken feelings of isolation and desire into the body language of women who long to emancipate themselves - not from Tunisian men or Arab culture, but from the everyday practices and social systems, both local and global, that entrap them.

— LAURA RICE