Distilled from the director’s own family tragedy, The Silences of the Palace, set in the 1950s, is a complex work that frames the Tunisian struggle for national independence within the parallel plight of women in the household of a governing prince. Tlatli’s microcosm of representsliberation is situated in the coming-of-age story of Alia, the illegitimate daughter of a palace servant who attempts to come to terms with her feudal upbringing at a time of anti-colonial liberation politics. With her signature attention to the minutiae of lived experience, Tlatli subtly captures Alia’s struggles in becoming a woman: the unfamiliar new sexuality, her rebellious refusal to submit to the degradation her mother's generation endured. Just as the grown-up Alia remains at the film’s end haunted by her childhood, the newly independent Tunisia is not that different from the old.