After amassing critical acclaim for Beauty and the Dogs (2017) and The Man Who Sold His Skin (2020), both of which were Tunisian entries for the Foreign Film Oscar, filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania has now come up with a unique hybrid film, Four Daughters that mixes the documentary format with fiction filmmaking.
About Olfa Hamrouni and her four daughters, two of whom—Rahma and Ghofrane—got radicalised and left Tunisia to fight along with the Islamic State (IS) in Libya, the film probes into the repercussions of their disappearance. It’s an account of how their decision doesn’t just alter their own lives but turns the world upside down for their mother and sisters—Eya and Tayssir.
Ben Hania uses available footage, in-camera testimonies from the three women and has professional actors reenacting some crucial moments from their lives in the past to build a scary and affecting narrative of a horrifying reality and the politics of violence. It lets the mother and daughters tell their own traumatic stories and that of their broken family.
Four Daughters had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May where it won the independent L’OEil d’or award for the best documentary. Tunisia’s entry to the Oscars this year, it is playing at the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival.
Excerpts from an interview with Ben Hania done at Cannes:
The standout aspect about your film is the access that you've got to the mother and her two daughters. How did you go about it?
It's the trust that I built over many years. I started this project in 2016 which is when I contacted the mother. She thought I was a journalist. I had to explain to her that she would be seeing me often in the coming years. I won’t just film her and disappear. So, they welcomed me into their lives. That time the media was talking about their story. They were banned, turned into persona non grata, and were actively hated because of the other two daughters. They were told that they were monsters, that the [radicalised] girls were monsters. They had no friends; nobody was talking to them. I was the only one interested in their story, only one not being judgmental but trying to understand them. It brought us closer and over the years we became like a family.
What was it about their story that made you opt for the hybrid form?
The movie is about introspection and I'm using the tool of cinema to make this possible. It’s double introspection—it’s also about the genre, about what is real, what is not, what is truth. I'm not interested in just the fiction or documentary aspects. I'm interested in something beyond, something about truth, about touching a human soul, understanding something deeper about women, about a mother-daughter relationship.
To me it's also about taking control of our own stories. The women have agency in telling their own story, the way they want to. You are looking at your own country’s reality more than the perspective we get from the Western media.
There are a lot of clichés around the world when it comes to these kinds of stories. To be able to tell things from inside, with your own sensitivity, you get at what lies behind the clichés, the entire spectrum of complexity. It gives richness to the story. I think it's important to tell our stories from inside.
More than the extremism, the radicalisation, it’s the mother, the daughters, their points of view that reach out. It's a woman's world and yet there’s so much struggle, injustice.
It is so because it is intimate, and we relate to intimacy. We are all daughters; we all have mothers. We all have been teenagers. It is universal.
How did you synergise reality with the performative aspect? You’ve made real people act and have turned actors real.
We worked on that. I told them in the beginning, you will act like real people. You know how the actors are; they want to prepare; they want to rehearse. But I told them no, come as you are. I want your authentic reactions as a human being. I want your confusion. I was conscious that it was a film about sensitive things, about traumatic memories. It was also a kind of collective therapy. I asked all the crew members and actors to tell me all the things they didn't like on set, so we could agree that we would not do them. This was like the first contract between us—no anger, no complaining, no negative vibes. It was collaborative. So, everybody felt that they were participating in this. It was a very friendly, woman-friendly set.
The film deals with a tricky issue. It involves taking risks as a filmmaker.
I knew that I was taking it, but I love challenges. And it's not the first such film from me.
How much of a support do you get for the kind of films you do, in terms of production and audience?
I think that my Oscar nominations have given me validity. But documentaries are not too expensive. We got enough money to do it. And for the future? We are trying to raise finance here in Cannes, I'm with my producer. It will be shot next year and it's also a story set in Tunisia about two generations of women, but it's also about a myth, a legend and how legends are fabricated.