‘Four Daughters’ Review: Kaouther Ben Hania’s Inventive Documentary/Narrative Hybrid is One of the Best Films of the Year | Toronto

Love can be painful, hard and overbearing. That’s particularly true when it comes to maternal love in the Middle East, a region where love is usually overpowered by deeply rooted traditions, customs and socio-religious values that dictate how that love can be expressed and practiced. Notions of choice, freedom and independence are often sidelined, at the expense of conformity, succumbing to peer and societal pressures and a growing need to fit in and earn acceptance.

These layered, complex nuances are at the center of Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania’s Four Daughters, a much more polished, gripping picture compared to her previous Oscar-nominated The Man Who Sold His Skin (Best International Feature Film, 2021) and certainly one of the most memorable, stirring and moving Middle Eastern films of the decade. This is not an overstatement, particularly when examining the film’s pure genius hybrid format that combines the imagined and the factual, blending harrowing narrative sequences with actual interviews with its subjects. The result is an unflinching, hard-to-watch but essential docu-drama that manages to bravely examine the roots of hatred, identity crises and suppressed desires that plague the MENA region to this day.

Based on a harrowing true story that made global headlines, and is still talked about today, the film focuses on Olfa Olfa Hamrouni, the mother of 4 daughters, two of whom (Rahma and Ghoufran Chikhaoui) fled their country to join ISIS. The first, Rahma, was only 17 when she made the decision to join the terrorist group, having been married to terrorist Noureddine Chouchane, the 36-year-old Tunisian chief of Ansar al-Sharia in Sabratha,who  was suspected of planning a major attack on Sousse, Tunisia, that killed 38 people. Ghoufran, Rahma’s sister, had fled earlier, having not shown up for work one day only for her family to later on reach the shocking discovery.

What makes Four Daughters fascinating is that it traces the girls’ upbringing, from the eyes of their mother as well as their sisters who remained in Tunisia and did not join ISIS. Rather than making the film centered around how and why the girls were radicalized, it becomes much more than that: an examination of the multi-layered, tumultuous dynamic between Olfa and her four daughters, a reflection of how Olfa’s poisonous upbringing and troubled marriage impacted the way she handled her children – and a fascinating, often harrowing, examination how sexual suppression, oppression and isolation that each of the girls had experienced scarred them for life. In expanding the scope of the film to paint a picture of both the women who stayed as well as those who left to join ISIS, the film becomes much more resonant and powerfully insightful, speaking for countless women in the region instead of one particular story.

Ben Hania’s brilliant decision to bring such a shocking story to the screen in a hybrid format works so marvelously that the film never loses momentum, and remains as stunning, touching and deeply insightful, offering viewers a rare window to the staggering contradictions and agonizing traumas that women endure in the region. The format allows Hania to alternate between performed scenes and interviews, offering the film a unique ability to shift tones while never losing its coherent narrative. 

By featuring the actual mother and two of her daughters (those who still remain in Tunisia today) as on-screen subjects, as well as selecting highly skilled actresses (including acclaimed Tunisian actress Hend Sabri) to play the imprisoned daughters as well as the mother in scenes that are too hard for the real subjects to narrate on camera, the film allows us to both follow the story of its protagonists as well as observe the many nuances hidden in the actual subjects’ spoken lines, shaky voices, troubled recollections and sincere tears. The picture also becomes one of the most effective and deeply sincere case studies of what it means to be a woman in the Middle East. It’s a question whose answer is sometimes stranger than fiction, and sometimes too hard to believe that it requires imagination to bring the experience closer to viewers. 

Neither a documentary nor a feature film in the academic or traditional sense, the film mirrors the realities of its five female subjects: as dramatic, shocking and devastating their ‘story’ might seem on a narrative level, this is, ultimately, the life they’ve lived and the actual ordeal they’ve had to endure. It’s all true, as much as we’d hoped it’s not, and the hybrid retelling of the story serves as a reminder of how healing it might be to finally be able to muster the courage to tell our very painful, personal stories in front of a camera – despite all the tears, risks of and judgment we may face. It’s not just an act of bravery, it’s also an act of solidarity, as our stories can speak for those who are still afraid to express, giving a voice to the many voiceless communities who seldom see their experiences presented on screen. 

A landmark achievement in every sense of the word, Four Daughters is a must-watch, a film that will most certainly find a passionate international audience when it most likely hits the Best International Feature Film Oscar shortlist this December. 

Grade: A

This review is from the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival. Kino Lorber will release Four Daughters in the U.S. and the film is the official Tunisian submission for the International Feature Film Oscar for the 96th Academy Awards.