The Silences of the Palace

Set in 1950s Tunisia, a 25-year-old woman, Alia, returns to her place of birth-a prince’s palace in which her mother, Khedija, worked as a house servant and mistress of prince Sid’ Ali. She had fled the palace ten years earlier, at which time she spent burying tortured memories of her childhood. In her visit to pay respects for the death of the prince, she 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 is re-awakened to her persistent questioning about her father’s identity. As she negotiates her past, she also deals with her current relationship to her lover, Lotfi, who has asked her to have another abortion. Her development throughout the film contrasts 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.