Silences of the Palace (Saimt el Qusur) (1994)

Alia is born to serve men. Her mother is a servant in the palace of the Bey--dispensing food, and her body, to the royal princes of Tunisia. As Alia, now a singer in post-colonial Tunisia, looks back at her childhood in the palace in the 1960's, she must come to terms with the meaning of her mother's life and the tradition of bondage she's attempting to escape.