Four Daughters (Kaouther Ben Hania, 2023)
The Oscar-nominated Four Daughters by Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania offers up an engrossing mixture of documentary and fiction.
Four Daughters won the award for best documentary at last year’s Cannes festival and was nominated for the best documentary Academy Award earlier this year, as well as winning a truck load of awards at other festivals and events.
The movie tells the story of Olfa Hamrouni, a Tunisian mother of four daughters, who made headlines in her home country in 2017, when her two eldest daughters Rahma and Ghofrane went missing.
Brought up as modern young women, after a while it became clear that they had joined Islamic State in Libya.
How did this happen? That’s the question twice Oscar nominated director Kaouther Ben Hania (also for her feature The Man Who Sold His Skin) tries to answer in this very original and deeply affecting film.
Her methods are a little unusual: Olfa and her two youngest daughters Tayssir and Eya are in it, while Rahma and Ghofrane are played by professional actresses Nour Karoui and Ichrak Matar, respectively. But Olfa is also played by someone else, in her case famous Tunesian actress Hind Sabri, in scenes that were deemed to be too emotional for Olfa to be in.
Together they re-enact scenes based on memories from Olfa and her daughters’ lives, as pieces of a puzzle that don’t always match up but are fascinating in their own right.
The result is not a feature film but not quite a documentary either, it’s an exhilarating combination of Women Talking and Group Therapy. It’s also a Labour of Love for all involved, and for Olfa, Tayssir and Eya in particular.
Love isn’t always easy, though. Olfa survived a tough and violent upbringing and even though her views on life are more progressive than those of previous generations, as a divorced single mother of four she fell back on domestic violence to keep her daughters in line.
Which may be why Rahma and Ghofrane rejected Olfa completely and went their own way by ironically joining the most conservative and anti-feminist religious movement imaginable.
It’s a heartbreaking story, but told in such an emotionally powerful way that you can’t help but be both moved and impressed by it.
It’s also beautifully shot, in a way that makes it not only a truly cinematic but also unforgettable experience.
Four Daughters. Five stars.
Note: Four Daughters is on Prime Video.