Tunisian director of multi-award-winning features won wide acclaim for film about the trauma suffered by generations of women
Moufida Tlatli, the pioneering Tunisian film-maker behind much-admired festival hits The Silences of the Palace and The Season of Men, has died aged 73. News media said that she died on Sunday, with the news confirmed by the Tunisian ministry of culture.
Tlatli remains best known for her breakthrough 1994 feature The Silences of the Palace, a lyrical study of a woman’s return to an abandoned royal residence, which tackled the themes of exploitation and trauma as experienced across generations of Arab
Women. It won a string of international awards, including the Sutherland trophy at the
London film festival for the most “original and imaginative” film of the year, and was named as one of Africa’s 10 best films by critic and director Mark Cousins. The film was inspired by her mother’s difficult life; in 2001, Tlatli told the Guardian she “was riven with guilt … It was so insupportable, exhausting, suffocating.”