Four Daughters [2023]

 The line between nonfiction and narrative filmmaking – and in turn between the supposed candour of the former and the inherent artifice in the latter – was boldly blurred by Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania in her stunning genre-bending documentary Four Daughters. What unfolded in her formally adventurous work – that involved gutsy deconstruction of truth, memory and complex past experiences – was ultimately a daring psychoanalytic exercise in therapy and catharsis, wherein renewed interpretations of past traumas through the prism of time are hoped to enable clarity and peace. The film’s tricky hybrid setup is established at the outset. Olfa Hamrouni’s two eldest daughters Ghofrane and Rahma disappeared in 2015 while still teenagers, in order to join ISIS; Ben Hania, in order to understand what led to their descent into lunacy and the bruise that was left in its wake, deployed two female actors to enact them, well-known actress Hend Sabri to play Olfa when things got emotionally difficult, and a male actor to play the abusive men in her life, along with Olfa and her two younger daughters Eya and Tayssir – playing themselves while recreating key stages from their shared lives – to craft this devastating tale of grief, anguish and loss. The docu comprises of underlying elements of enactment and simulation, and the manipulative possibilities therein, made it an uncomfortable watch at times, aside from being an unsettling one too. These, nevertheless, complemented its formal audacity, and the extraordinary courage that Olfa, Eya and Tayssir displayed in reliving their intensely private anecdotes. Furthermore, it’s also filled with disarming humour, deep sincerity and delicate tenderness that mellowed its darker, painful and harrowing components, and took exploitative possibilities out of the film’s framework.

Director: Kaouther Ben Hania

Genre: Documentary/Diary Film

Language: Arabic

Country: Tunisia