 As Alia negotiates her past, she also deals with her current relationship to her lover, Lotfi, who has asked her to have what seems to be yet another abortion.Her development throughout the film contrasts her awakening to a past of sexual and social servitude which many of the female servants experienced in the palace against her own contested independence fraught with pain, conflict and uncertainty.The film received positive attention at the New York Film Festival in 1994; "New York Times" critic Caryn James describes the film as a "universal coming-of-age story with a feminist twist."