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In mid-March, weeks after a ship wrecked on Italy’s Calabrian coast, the waters of the Mediterranean Sea were still releasing ashore what remained: planks of wood, engine parts, children’s shoes, bodies. The season of drowning migrants had come early this year.Listen to This ArticleFor more audio journalism and storytelling, More
In this Tunisian drama, a terrorist attack sends a husband and wife into a spiraling crisis, opening a world of hurt and understanding.A tense emotional bloodletting, “A Son (Un Fils)” opens on a deceptively peaceful note. A group of men and women on the younger side of middle age have gathered together for a picnic, perhaps for a celebration. Convening in a pretty spot under a canopy of trees, they chatter and raise glasses, laughter and drinks freely flowing as children play nearby. And while the location is unclear, the geographic possibilities narrow when the picnickers speak Arabic with smatterings of French. The smiles keep coming, even when one reveler jokes about an imam and another says they’ll laugh less when the Islamists take over.Set in the summer of 2011, “A Son” unfolds in the aftermath of the Tunisian revolution, though never directly engages with the upheaval. (In January of that year, after mass protests, the authoritarian president fled the country, leading to the creation of a new government.) Instead, the writer-director Mehdi M. Barsaoui takes fairly oblique approach to the country’s turmoil. Without waving flags or voicing explicit politics, he emphasizes faces and feelings and specifically what happens when one of the families at the picnic — this joyous gathering, with its laughter and bare heads, contemporary clothing and ties to the modern world — blunders into a violent Islamist ambush.Fares (Sami Bouajila) and Meriem (Najla Ben Abdallah), a sexy, attractive, warmly affectionate couple, are first seen driving to the picnic in a Range Rover. Sometime later, they and their 11-year-old son, Aziz (Youssef Khemiri), are on the road again, this time headed south on a business trip for Fares. Their destination is Tataouine, a location bounded by desert and a few hours from Libya, then in the midst of civil war. There, the family checks into a luxury hotel, and you wait for the worst.It arrives shortly thereafter with narrative economy, gunfire blasts and a shock of visceral terror. One minute the family is singing along to a pop tune; an eye-blink later, Fares is racing down the road in reverse with shattered windows and a severely wounded Aziz, and you’re abruptly watching a new movie. Fares and Meriem rush him to a hospital, where Barsaoui begins thwarting your assumptions about what to expect. And as the tone, vibe and storytelling parts shift and shift again — the movie is by turns a hospital drama, a marriage melodrama, a black-market intrigue — Meriem and especially Fares draw you near, push you away and prompt you to choose sides.Barsaoui folds in a lot of narrative turns in the compressed time frame and in the cramped spaces of the main locale, the rundown regional hospital where Fares and Meriem worriedly wait as doctors tend to Aziz. Although the focus remains on the parents, their anguished faces and blood-soaked clothing, Barsaoui takes laps around the rest of the hospital, where watchful women in head scarves also wait. The silence of these other visitors — some accompanied, others alone — thickens meaningfully as Fares and Meriem’s relationship is tested and their voices grow louder, angrier. What, Barsaoui seems to ask, do these other women — emissaries from another Tunisia that Fares and Meriem share but don’t inhabit — think, hope and want?What Barsaoui wants is for you to notice these women and see how they look at this couple, who rarely return their gaze, a blinkeredness that’s understandable if also revealing. If this were a certain kind of European art film, Fares and Meriem might be punished for living in a bourgeois, secular echo chamber. But Barsaoui doesn’t brutalize his characters, even when he shows them (and you) the depths of human depravity. Their child may be dying and their marriage might be too, and that is pain enough. But there’s more to life than one’s own sorrow, as Barsaoui underscores with another child, an unloved boy who enters late and brings the horrors of the larger world with him.A Son (Un Fils)Not rated. In French and Arabic, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More
AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyTHOSE WE’VE LOSTMoufida Tlatli, Groundbreaker in Arab Film, Dies at 78With “The Silences of the Palace,” a story of oppressed women in colonial Tunisia, she was first female director from the Arab world to achieve worldwide acclaim.Hend Sabri starring in Moufida Tlatli’s “The Silences of the Palace.” In a film that explored the stifling of women, she played the daughter of a servant of Tunisian princes.Credit…CinetelefilmsMarch 4, 2021, 4:50 p.m. ETMoufida Tlatli, the Tunisian director whose 1994 film “The Silences of the Palace” became the first international hit for a female filmmaker from the Arab world, died on Feb. 7 in Tunis. She was 78.Her daughter, Selima Chaffai, said the cause was Covid-19.“The Silences of the Palace,” which Ms. Tlatli directed and co-wrote with Nouri Bouzid, is set in the mid-1960s but consists largely of flashbacks to a decade earlier, before Tunisia achieved independence from France.The protagonist, a young woman named Alia (played by Hend Sabri), reflects on the powerlessness of women in that prior era, including her mother, Khedija (Amel Hedhili), a servant in the palace of Tunisian princes. Alia’s memories prompt a revelation that she has not achieved true autonomy even in the more liberated milieu of her own time.“Silences” won several international awards, including special mention in the best debut feature category at Cannes, making Ms. Tlatli the first female Arab director to be honored by that film festival. It was shown at the New York Film Festival later that year. In her review, Caryn James of The New York Times called it “a fascinating and accomplished film.”In an interview, Hichem Ben Ammar, a Tunisian documentary filmmaker, said “Silences” was “the first Tunisian movie that reached out to the American market.”Its significance was particularly great for women in the Arab world’s generally patriarchal film industry, said Rasha Salti, a programmer of Arab film festivals. Though “Silences” was not the first feature-length film directed by an Arab woman, “it has a visibility that outshines the achievements of others,” she said.Moufida Ben Slimane was born on Aug. 4, 1942, in Sidi Bou Said, a suburb of Tunis. Her father, Ahmed, worked as a decorative painter and craftsman at palaces of the Tunisian nobility. Her mother, Mongia, was a homemaker. Moufida, one of six children, helped care for her younger siblings. As a teenager she spent nights at a local movie theater watching Indian and Egyptian dramas.She grew up during a period of social reform under the Tunisian president Habib Bourguiba, a supporter of women’s rights. In high school, Moufida’s philosophy teacher introduced her to the work of Ingmar Bergman and other European directors. In the mid-1960s, she won a scholarship to attend the Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies in Paris. After graduating, she continued living in France until 1972, working as a script supervisor.In Tunisia, Ms. Tlatli became admired as a film editor, working on such classics of Arab cinema as “Omar Gatlato” and “Halfaouine.” “Silences” was her debut as a director.The movie’s theme of silence is dramatized by the refusal of the servant Khedija to tell Alia the identity of her father. Alia never solves this mystery, but she does glimpse a brutal reality: how her mother had quietly suffered through sexual bondage to the palace’s two princes.Silence is a hallmark of palace culture. During music lessons in the garden and at ballroom parties, aristocrats make small talk and servants say nothing. Discretion signifies gentility. Yet that same discretion also cloaks the palace’s sexual violence and muzzles its victims. Female servants learn to communicate with one another through grimaces or glares.“All the women are within the tradition of taboo, of silence, but the power of their look is extraordinary,” Ms. Tlatli said in a 1995 interview with the British magazine Sight & Sound. “They have had to get used to expressing themselves through their eyes.”Ms. Tlatli discovered that this “culture of the indirect” was ideally suited to the medium of film.“This is why the camera is so amazing,” she said. “It’s in complete harmony with this rather repressed language. A camera is somewhat sly and hidden. It’s there, and it can capture small details about something one is trying to say.”After “Silences,” Ms. Tlatli directed “The Season of Men” (2000), which also follows women of different generations contending with deeply ingrained social customs. Her final film was “Nadia and Sarra” (2004).In 2011, Ms. Tlatli briefly served as culture minister of the interim government that took over Tunisia following the ouster of the dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. “She commands respect not only as a filmmaker and film editor, but also because she was not co-opted by the system,” Ms. Salti, the film programmer, said.In addition to her daughter, Ms. Tlatli is survived by her husband, Mohamed Tlatli, a businessman involved in oil and gas exploration; a son, Walid; and five grandchildren.Ms. Tlatli was inspired to make a movie of her own after giving birth to Walid and leaving him with her mother, following Tunisian tradition, even though her mother was already caring for four sons of her own. Her mother had long been a “silent woman,” Ms. Tlatli told The Guardian in 2001, before falling ill with Alzheimer’s disease and losing her voice.Her mother’s life, she said, had become “insupportable, exhausting, suffocating.”Ms. Tlatli spent seven years away from film as she raised her children and helped her mother. The experience gave her a sense that unexamined gulfs lay between women of different generations, much like the one she would portray between a mother and daughter in “Silences.”“I wanted to talk with her, and it was too late,” she said about her mother in 1995. “I projected all that on my daughter and thought, Maybe she wasn’t feeling close to me. That made me feel the urgency to make this film.”Lilia Blaise contributed reporting from Tunis.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More
