Moufida Tlatli, innovator in Arab film, dies at 78

Moufida 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 Feb. 7 in Tunis. She was 78.

Her daughter, Selima Chaffai, said the cause was COVID-19.

“The Silences of the Palace,” which Tlatli directed and cowrote 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 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 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 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, 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,” Tlatli said in a 1995 interview with the British magazine Sight & Sound. “They have had to get used to expressing themselves through their eyes.” 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,” 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, Tlatli briefly served as culture minister of the interim government that took over Tunisia following the ouster of 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,” Salti, the film programmer, said.

In addition to her daughter, Tlatli is survived by her husband, Mohamed Tlatli, a businessman involved in oil and gas exploration; a son, Walid; and five grandchildren. 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 already was caring for four sons of her own. Her mother long had been a “silent woman,” 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.”

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.”

Joseph D. Duffey, a coal miner’s son and ordained minister whose anti-war campaign for the U.S. Senate from Connecticut in 1970 galvanized a generation of campus liberals and who later served as a cultural arbiter in the Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton administrations and presided over two major universities, died Feb. 25 at his home in Washington, D.C. He was 88.

His death was confirmed by his son, Michael.

A self-described “hillbilly and a Baptist” from West Virginia, Duffey had organized Freedom Rides for civil rights in the South and protests against the Vietnam War before seeking the Senate seat from Connecticut. He lost, but his insurgent candidacy jolted the Democratic Party organization and catapulted him into appointive jobs, thanks to two other “hillbilly Baptists” who happened to become presidents of the United States.

Carter named him assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural affairs in early 1977, and later that year Duffey was named chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a post he occupied until 1982, into the Ronald Reagan presidential years.

In 1993, Clinton recruited him to be director of the U.S. Information Agency, which promotes American policy abroad. He was its last director as an independent agency; it was absorbed into the State Department in 1999.

Duffey was chancellor of the University of Massachusetts from 1982 to 1991 and chancellor of American University in Washington from 1991 to 1993.

He entered the political fray after succeeding Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith as chairman of the liberal advocacy group Americans for Democratic Action. In 1970, he was going up against John Bailey’s Connecticut Democratic machine.

Bailey supported Alphonsus Donahue, a wealthy Stamford businessman, to fill the seat that had been held since 1958 by Sen. Thomas Dodd, a fellow Democrat who had been censured in the Senate for diverting campaign funds for personal use and repudiated by party leaders when he sought reelection to a third term. (His son Christopher Dodd later was elected to the Senate from the state.)

Attracting an array of boldface-name supporters, including actor Paul Newman, who had a home in Westport, Connecticut, Duffey upset Donahue and a state legislator to win the nomination.

Mounted two years after the failed progressive presidential candidacy of Sen. Eugene McCarthy in 1968, Duffey’s campaign energized campus progressives, including a young Clinton, then a student at Yale Law School.

They embraced Duffey as an honest broker who might bridge the gap between disaffected liberal Democrats and blue-collar voters who had switched to the Republican Party and helped put Richard Nixon in the White House in 1968.

“At a time when young people were so desperately hungry for honesty and conviction, he met that moment with grace and eloquence,” U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat and a former law school classmate of Clinton’s, said of Duffey this week.

But Duffey’s campaign was dealt a setback when Thomas Dodd entered the general election race that fall as an independent. Thomas Dodd wound up splitting the Democratic vote, allowing the Republican nominee, Lowell Weicker, to slip into office with less than 42% of the vote. (Thomas Dodd died less than seven months later.)

“In the fall of 1970, I missed about half of my law school classes trying to help get Joe Duffey elected to the Senate,” Clinton said in a statement. “There were so many of us who were drawn to his deep commitment to peace, economic fairness and civil rights. Joe lost the election, but he left us all proud, wiser in the ways of politics and richer in lifelong friends, including Joe himself.”

Joseph Daniel Duffey was born July 1, 1932 in Huntington, West Virginia, in the western foothills of the Appalachians. His father, Joseph Ivanhoe Duffey, lost a leg in a mining accident and became a barber. His mother, Ruth (Wilson) Duffey, a telegraph operator, died when Joe was 13.

Raised in the Baptist church and later ordained as a Congregational minister, he earned a bachelor’s degree from Marshall University in Huntington in 1954; a bachelor of divinity degree from Andover Theological Seminary in Massachusetts (now Andover Newton Seminary at Yale Divinity School) in 1957; a master’s from Yale Divinity School in 1963; and a doctorate from what is now the Hartford Seminary in Connecticut in 1969.

In 1952, Duffey married Patricia Fortney, whom he had met at a Baptist youth convention; they divorced in 1973. A year later, he married Anne Wexler, who ran his 1970 campaign, became an aide to Carter and then a prominent Washington operative and lobbyist; she died in 2009.

In addition to his son Michael, from his first marriage, he is survived by his partner, Marian Burros, a former food writer for The New York Times; two stepsons, Daniel and David Wexler; two sisters, Ida Ruth Plymale and Patrica Duffey Keesee; and four grandchildren.

Duffey brought his progressive sensibilities to his job as chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities under Carter. He defined the job to the Times in 1977 as awarding federal grants to support “disciplines whose function and purpose are self-discovery and the exploration of the human experience.” And he acknowledged that he had encountered flak for focusing on what he called “neglected areas of research,” including the study of women and minority groups in America and the history of the Middle East.

His background as chief administrative officer for the American Association of University Professors from 1974 to 1976 helped pave the way for his appointments to the chancellorships of the University of Massachusetts and American University.

As a product of the anti-war movement, Duffey cautioned against romanticizing the era, recalling it as a time of deep national division. But at a reunion of some of his 1970 campaign volunteers in 1993, after Clinton had risen to the White House, he reminded them that though it had taken Clinton’s election to reunite them, they should hold fast to their liberal principles and continue to work for what could bring them together again.

“Looking at you, I’m sure there’s another president here,” Duffey said.