The Academy Awards nominated Tunisia’s submission, “Four Daughters” (2023), to the 2024 Oscars “Documentary Feature Film.” The film already won the 2023 Cannes’ l’Oeil d’Or for feature documentary. Writer and director Kaouther Ben Hania examines how one Tunisian mother, Olfa Hamrouni, lost two of her eldest four daughters, Ghofrane and Rahma Chikhaul, who ran away to neighboring Libya to join Daesh, a transnational, radicalized and militarized Islamic extremist group, which Westerners call Isis or Isil, in 2014.
Ben Hania’s film does not follow the format of most documentaries. No talking heads appear to offer their expertise or analyze the tale in a dispassionate way. Olfa and her younger two daughters, Eya and Tayssir Chikhaoui, are not just interviewees offering their eyewitness perspective on the past, but direct and act in recreations with actors playing Olfa (Hind Sabri), their older sisters (Ichrak Matar and Nour Karoui) and the men who have brief (un)supporting roles in the family’s lives (Maid Mastoura). The film includes footage of Sabri, Karoui and Matar interacting with the two-generation family when no one is acting.
“Four Daughters” is a participatory documentary, which means the filmmaker appears in the film. She narrated the introduction and talks off screen while only fractions of her body are visible. Ben Hania states that she is telling the story of four daughters, and the opening scene is like a play with the two missing daughters appearing as distant shadows in the background wings framing Olfa as a light rises behind them to reveal that they were always present even when not visible. The younger two frame Olfa in the foreground. Occasionally the camera furtively frames the family of three from the side as if peeking through a curtain at the stage. Olfa is nervous, leg shaking, unable to sit still. The subsequent scene features Sabri as herself, getting ready in the makeup chair resplendent in red, conveying her emotions and asking about the woman that she is going to portray. Scenes reveal Sabri practicing mimicking Olfa’s affect, or the younger participants engaging in vocal exercises. Olfa and her children are excited to meet the actors playing the older two daughters as if they could act forever as substitutes for those who are absent. Sabri is almost relegated to the margins and devotes more time to analyzing the family dynamic and offering constructive criticism to Olfa on better ways to parent.
Filmed in 2021, “Four Daughters” predates “May December” (2023) and alludes to similar ethical considerations of the disruptive effect that actors and their characters’ real-life counterparts have on each other as they reconstruct the past. Ben Hania plays with the imagery of the mutability between two different women merging as one for the film with Olfa’s reflection serving as Sabri’s mirror image. Unlike the characters in Todd Haynes’ film, this family hides nothing, and the actors try to maintain decorum and distance. The family wants to use the film as a testimony, an objective witness to the world and each other, specifically the daughters to Olfa so she can stop being an abusive mother, and they voice their frustrations. The film functions as a safe refuge for the sisters to be equals to Olfa and full human beings without fear of repercussions, a better, albeit imperfect and transitory alternative to Daesh. The actors understand that a film is not a vindicating reality and want to protect themselves and the family.
The family views the reconstructions as therapeutic by enabling them to pretend like they are one happy, reunited family and offering an opportunity to Eya and Tassir to direct their pain or wish for vengeance on a safe target, Mastoura. Mastuora asks Ben Hania to cut one scene and refuses to participate onscreen further as he lies next to one of the girls, who is brandishing a knife. “Four Daughters” teems with trauma even when everyone is laughing and appearing to have a good time. In one veiled attempt at humor, Sabri and Mastoura play Olfa and her first husband as they are watching television. The television is broadcasting a movie or series which also features Sabri. The actors break character to comment on the misogynistic, cold exchange because the husband calls the woman in the television show, whom Sabri also plays, a whore, a casual insult levelled at little girls or women for behavior unrelated to sex, but just existing as a female in society.
The generational curse of internalized misogyny is a theme in “Four Daughters,” which may remind some of fraternal curse in “The Iron Claw” (2023). Olfa recounts her wedding night, and her sister siding with her husband. Olfa fails to see how her struggle is connected to her abusive treatment of her little girls. Olfa admits to perpetuating the abuse heaped on her. Then the denouement reveals how a third generation’s life is even more repressive and restrictive than the ones that preceded her existence.
For those curious about Ben Hania’s aesthetic, imagine if a filmmaker had Pedro Almodovar’s taste for primary colors (shout out to LA Times’ Justin Chang for beating me to the punch in writing a review and getting dibs on the reference) and Sofia Coppola’s deliberate, nostalgic lens and pacing. Ben Hania captures the ephemeral quality of sisterhood and burgeoning womanhood. When Eya and Tassir take center stage, they appear before a bright red lipstick-stained one-way mirror while Ben Hania films them from the other side. The green room/makeup room subconsciously doubles as a place of surveillance like a police station or an invasive trick mirror to deceive the gazer into believing that they can act naturally and are not subjects. It is a brilliant, silent visual critique of the nature of filmmaking as innately invasive and the nature of their real-life existence. Women are expected to be beautiful as a tax for existing, but being attractive is also a crime meriting suspicion and punishment. The green room serves as a liminal space between the past and present as the actors and family meet each other but aim for the wistful conviviality of a family reunion and familiarity they do not possess.
As “Four Daughters” unfolds, the scenes among the sisters depart from being reminiscent of Coppola’s light lyrical touch. As Rahma and Ghofrane look for ways to rebel and embrace a morbid fundamentalism, Ben Hania’s film gradually transforms into a horror film, specifically demonic possession, but nothing supernatural is afoot. The only evil is a cycle of abuse veiled in religious piety in one grand, demented righteous dance off over who can be more devoted to God, not to get closer to God but dominate others. It may remind some of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” which focuses on the teen girl hysteria as a power, not a property, grab.
Because I was unfamiliar with equating “devoured by the wolf” with Daesh, have no knowledge of Tunisian political history and never heard of this story before watching the documentary, I was genuinely surprised that no one kidnapped the elder girls, but that they willingly ran away, especially considering Olfa’s childhood. It is wild that Daesh is considered a more acceptable way of life than your birth home. The dialogue is rife with passive language as if something happened to them, and there was no amount of autonomy. It is a more complex, fluid spectrum of victim and perpetrator even if it is against oneself.