ABSTRACT
In Tunisian classic The Silences of the Palace by Moufida Tlatli, Alia, a 25-year-old wedding singer, returns to her place of birth and reminisces about her mother’s life as a servant and mistress in the palace of the Beys. The relationship between women of different generations but the same kin is one of the most dynamic relationships there is, precisely because it is both constant and constantly in flux. Women make films about women in order to address inequalities and imbalances in the representation of women’s identities and subjectivities on screen. From a socio-political recognition of the importance of cultural heterogeneity, over the acknowledgement of tradition and communal responsibility, to the psychology of a transformative experience of motherhood, female theorists and historians confirm the wide variety of mothering personalities and the collective yet personal experience of motherhood. Motherhood is a political act: through procreation women define posterity.
