Amid its many layers, Moufida Tlatli’s 1994 masterpiece The Silences of the Palace is a film about the distance, and inevitable tension, between a girl’s intuition and a woman’s hard-earned knowledge. Alia (Hend Sabri in a revelatory debut) is the girl in question, while the woman is her mother, Khedija (Amel Hedhili), a servant in the palace of one of Tunisia’s pre-independence beys, the elite who governed the country under French colonial rule.

The film opens on an adult Alia in the 1960s, a decade after the events that form the heart of the story. She is beautiful, earnest, and deeply unhappy. Although gifted with a stunning voice, her singing career is faltering. She is also pregnant, but her lover wants her to have an abortion: “A child needs a name, a family, a marriage”—things he isn’t willing to give her. Alia’s every look, every movement, tells us she is on the edge of despair. Then she learns about the death of Sidi Ali, the last surviving prince in the palace where her mother once served, and the viewer detects a slight shift in her demeanor; almost imperceptible, like the sound of a door unlatching in the dark. She returns to the palace to pay her condolences to the family, none of whom she has seen since she fled years ago.

What follows is an elegantly paced, deftly orchestrated unveiling: a solid testament to Tlatli’s sharp eye for detail and keen sense of rhythm, honed over years of experience as an editor. In the palace, as Alia wanders through the nearly-deserted servants’ quarters, memories rise like spectres from each neglected corner, often announcing themselves in sound before the flashback occupies the screen. Ironically, it is in the now palpably silent space that the truth rings clear, whereas in her childhood—when the palace bustled with noise and activity—it lay buried beneath words that confounded rather than clarified.

As an adolescent, Alia spends her days helping her mother and the other servants with their daily chores. They chop vegetables, wash bed linens, pluck freshly slaughtered chickens, knead dough for couscous, embroider napkins, bake trays of fish and lamb, and tread raw wool in water-filled basins before hanging it to dry in the sun. Through it all they drink lots of tea, sing and banter and laugh, and, sometimes, fight. Tlatli films their togetherness in long, languorous takes that mirror the slow, repetitive nature of their tasks, and the care they devote to them. Their solidarity is natural and necessary, but it is also a quiet complicity; a shared understanding of what must remain unspoken.

Though the viewer knows from the beginning that Sidi Ali is, in fact, Alia’s father, Alia herself doesn’t. This is the film’s epicenter of silence, and Alia’s burning need to know—or rather, to confirm what she intuitively knows—is the force that pushes against it, generating the painful friction that gives The Silences of the Palace its enduring power. She notices the charged glances between Sidi Ali and her mother when he asks Khedija to bring a drink up to his room. At times, he is also casually attentive to Alia herself. Yet whenever Alia questions her mother about her father’s identity, Khedija either lies or reprimands her. And while Alia’s confusion often gives way to anger, Khedija remains unapologetic—in her eyes, she is doing what she must. In her innocent pursuit for answers, driven by a child’s curiosity, the reality of the palace dynamics—and her mother’s role within them—gradually reveal themselves to Alia, raising even more questions about her place within the system.

This is where the spatial metaphor of the palace begins to take shape. Downstairs, the female servants’ domain, Alia is weighed down by her mother’s silence. Upstairs, where the beys reside, she finds occasional respite in the royal family’s sporadic displays of affection, but she is never truly embraced by them. So, Alia creates a refuge in the attic, crammed with old furniture and piles of clutter, among which is a small lute that she plays in moments of solitude and reflection.

It is in the attic where she hides her blood-streaked towel after she gets her first period, like a criminal covering her tracks. Alia’s experience of her changing body is laced with fear. Later, Khedija tells her she must be careful: “If a man touches you, run.” But while she is taught how to deflect others’ desires, nobody tells Alia what to do with her own. One of Alia’s major brushes with desire is entwined with a different kind of silence, the grand silence in whose shadow all other silences dwell, that which surrounds the state of Tunisia as a French protectorate. The beys are intermediaries of colonial control, charged with keeping the local population in check. As active participants, they discuss politics over drinks and cigars, while the servants speculate what will happen in hushed tones. Until the resistance moves in. Lotfi, a young teacher and dissident in hiding, is offered shelter in the palace by his friend until the danger subsides. When Lotfi first shows interest in Alia, she runs, just as her mother instructed. But soon a friendship develops between them, grounding their attraction. Through Lotfi, Alia learns about the fight for independence. He tells her that when Tunisia is free, she will be a great singer.

The film may be a painstaking reflection on silence and the structures that sustain it—from colonialism to the hierarchies of gender and class—but music is its central lifeline. For the servants, who sing folkloric ballads to ease the burden of their conditions, it is a distraction. For the beys, who host lavish soirées where live musicians perform but forbid patriotic songs in the palace, it is an assertion of power. For Alia, who listens to Umm Kulthum in adoration and practices her songs in private, it is a release. It is also the one thing that saves her when, after witnessing a devastating act of violence against her mother, she retreats into a silence of her own choosing, refusing to speak or even move. When Khedija saves up and buys her a oud, Alia sings—not in secret as before, but in the palace gardens, for everyone to see and hear. Like a newly discovered treasure, Alia’s voice is coveted and, ultimately, co-opted. The night Sidi Ali summons Alia to sing during one of the family’s gatherings, Khedija realizes her strategy of silence has failed to protect her daughter.

If one scene epitomizes the film’s paradox, showcasing Tlatli’s cinematic eloquence, it is that of Alia and her mother standing before the mirror, as Khedija tells her to get ready for her performance upstairs. Alia is perplexed—isn’t it her mother who always warned her against mingling with the family? She takes her mother’s place at the vanity and lifts Khedija’s lipstick to her mouth with blazing eyes. She may be obeying her mother, but she knows that—in essence—she is defying her. Khedija’s defeated stance, the way she lowers her gaze to the floor, is almost heartbreaking. It is a moment of profound psychological complexity, rendered with both clarity and evocation: looks fill in for words and composition for conflict.

The disruption of silence in the film unfolds on two fronts: Alia’s musical evolution and her political awakening. Both progress in tandem; she finds her voice when she receives the oud, and she’s introduced to the national struggle shortly after. This is why Alia’s spontaneous rebellion in the film’s penultimate sequence is so resonant. As she sings during her cousin’s engagement party, she sees her mother’s disquiet, and Lotfi’s disappointment. And it is as though, in this silent exchange, she realizes that Khedija’s subjugation and the nation’s are not unrelated. Neither is her presence onstage. And so when she halts midway through her performance then breaks into a rendition of “O, Green Tunisia,” she isn’t only confronting the aristocrats with their complicity; she is also subverting their gaze, refusing to succumb to it.

After her mother’s death, Alia finally breaks free of the palace, but what awaits her beyond its walls, and post-independence, as we see in the film’s early scenes, is not liberation. She still lives in secrecy and fear, bearing the stigma of being born an illegitimate child, and faced with the prospect of birthing one. Having grown to understand the world her late mother had had to reckon with, Alia covers the distance separating them; the distance to hard-earned knowledge. The Silences of the Palace’s final achievement is how its disparate temporalities converge—time is no longer linear; it’s fluid. Only by re-inhabiting the past in her present can Alia imagine a future: one that forgoes her mother’s mistakes, and, most poignantly, honors her sacrifices. It’s not a resolution, but a recognition.