FOUR DAUGHTERS – Review by Jennifer Green
Tunisia’s official entry for the International Film Feature film Oscar, Four Daughters (Les Filles d’Olfa) is a deeply emotional story told in captivating fashion by combining real people and actors in an unusual blend of reenactments and conversations. It won a Golden Eye award for Best Documentary at Cannes and has traveled to other top international film festivals. The film deserves a wider berth than the festival and arthouse circuit, but it could be a hard sell. That’s a shame, though, because it’s a surprisingly engaging story with a memorable cast of charismatic characters and a relevance beyond just its subjects’ lives.
Director Kaouther Ben Hania has experimented with combining actors and real people to tell the story of one family. The first section of the documentary is dedicated to explaining how the set-up will work. The matriarch, Olfa, and her two youngest daughters, Eya and Tayssir, speak directly to the camera and to each other about what’s about to transpire. They meet the two actresses playing their sisters, Ichrak Matar as Ghofrane and Nour Karoui as Rahma, for the first time on screen, eliciting giggles and amazement. The camera seems hidden behind a mirror of some sort.
They’re nervous about reenacting their own painful story, for reasons we won’t know until well into the movie. Olfa says reliving their past will open old wounds. Meanwhile, the actress who will play her, stepping in when reenactments are too emotional, Hind Sabri, seems just as nervous. Hers is an unusual task. The actors and Ben Hania are called on to serve almost as counselors for the family members reliving and recounting difficult events. Actor Majd Mastoura, who plays every one of the male characters, has to take a pause during a particularly emotional scene.
As Sabri gets more comfortable and learns more about the story, she starts pressing Olfa on some of her decisions and past actions. Olfa deserves this. She’s a study in contradictions, impossibly strong and self-sufficient in an area of the world that doesn’t always reward women for these qualities, but also a stone-cold disciplinarian with a long history of insulting and beating her daughters as well as leaving them vulnerable to abuse by men. “I hate girls,” she says, calling it a “tragedy” to have daughters.
Her life story helps explain this view. As a girl, we learn, Olfa pretended to be a boy to avoid and potentially beat up male interlopers who tried to break into her mother’s house. On her wedding night, reenacted in a shockingly funny scene, she beat up her husband then wiped the blood from his nose on a sheet exhibited to guests as proof of her virginity. The girls later suffered abuse at the hands of their father and a stepfather-figure. When revolution came to Tunisia in 2010-2011, Olfa says she was inspired to “revolutionize” her own life, and she packed up and left her husband.
The film doesn’t unfurl in straight chronological order. Subjects regularly stop to talk to the camera or to each other about what’s going on in a scene or how they feel now. They’re often framed in doorways or glimpsed in mirrors, perhaps symbolic of the way they are letting us enter their lives and how they’re seeing their own story reflected in reenactments and acting.
Without giving away what happened to the two missing daughters, suffice it to say that this is a film with striking insights into how the recent history of Tunisia has impacted everyday people. It’s also a study in how violence is passed down from generation to generation, not just male on female (rampant and shocking), but also mother to daughter, and how this can tie into the radicalization of young people. Olfa calls it a “curse.” Sabri assures her it will stop with her daughters’ generation, and indeed the younger girls are surprisingly frank and balanced. And therein lies the hopefulness of this film. Though it tells a dark tale, the whip-smart women portrayed here are so full of energy and independence it would seem nothing could keep them down.
