The Season of Men

Tlatli's long-awaited follow-up to The Silences of the Palace plies similar territory: a family of women returns to the island where they used to live, cloistered away by absent working menfolk, to take stock. Cue flashbacks. The director's themes are sisterhood and sacrifice, eternal growing pains, inequity and inhibition, the weight of the past, the yielding of tradition to modernity. It's less ornate, the focus broader, the treatment open- and a little loose-ended; the tone more deftly ambivalent but gently hopeful.