“As actors, we learn to keep a certain distance,” Tunisian movie star Hend Sabri assures Olfa Hamrouni, the middle-aged mom whose traumatic expertise Sabri will quickly be depicting onscreen. Olfa responds, “And what if you can’t?”
This query is on the crux of Four Daughters, Kaouther Ben Hania’s hybrid documentary that creatively reenacts the circumstances resulting in the radicalization and disappearance of Olfa’s two eldest daughters, Ghofrane and Rahma, within the aftermath of the Tunisian revolution. Playing the lacking girls, actors Nour Karoui and Ichraq Matar be a part of Eya and Tayssir, Olfa’s remaining daughters, to stage and study the relationships inside their very own household. What leads two rebellious, ebullient younger girls to flee their properties and be a part of a patriarchal terrorist group? What psychic toll does their loss tackle these left behind?
Nominated for an Oscar for Documentary Feature, Four Daughters is most overtly in regards to the ache of dropping a member of the family beneath the affect of spiritual extremists. But Ben Hania’s movie can also be in regards to the cathartic prospects of seizing one’s private narrative — particularly for girls who’ve by no means had the prospect to really personal their tales. “You will have to feel everything that I felt,” Olfa tells Sabri, “the suffering I endured, the pain of separation.”
As it seems, Olfa has wrought all method of struggling — particularly on her daughters, from false accusations of sexual promiscuity to beating one with a broomstick till it breaks. “I hate girls. I never wanted daughters,” she admits to the digital camera after sharing a narrative of narrowly escaping her personal rape on her marriage ceremony evening. Ben Hania confronts Olfa’s historical past as a verbally and bodily abusive mom head on, taking care to carry her accountable with out making her a villain. It is painful to see a mom who so fiercely loves her kids additionally put them in hurt’s approach, exposing them to sexual violence after a brand new boyfriend strikes in. “She said that it was our fault that she lost him,” Tayssir tearfully displays after a very fraught reenactment. “But we’re the ones who are lost because of him.”
Between scenes portraying the daughters’ anguish are jolts of actual pleasure. Eya and Tayssir snort with their actor-sisters about placing on a maxi pad sticky-side up, and, with their mom’s gleeful participation, they restage a patriotic majorette march from center college. The intimacy between the sisters and newcomers Nour and Ichraq suggests the solidarity that may blossom between girls, even when the hardships they’ve endured fluctuate wildly. As they pile on prime of one another on a trundle mattress, fondle one another’s hair, and end one another’s verses throughout a sappy Arabic pop music, it’s straightforward to neglect that the colourful quartet aren’t truly blood kin, that the true Ghofrane and Rahma are in truth locked up in a Libyan jail for terrorist affiliation.
All this Ben Hania captures with a eager sense of compassion behind the lens. Olfa isn’t blamed for her daughters’ disappearance, however she’s not inculpable. When Sabri factors out how a lot Olfa’s historical past of hurled epithets have damage her women, she is initially dismissive, saying, “It’s the legacy of several generations, a heritage.” By the top of the movie, this “legacy” turns into, by Olfa’s personal admission, a “curse,” one that may persist “until a generation breaks the chain.”
Inviting viewers to contemplate our personal histories of misogyny — whether or not acutely aware or unwitting, expressed or internalized — Four Daughters blurs the gap between the non-public and cultural, the person and the systemic. Ben Hania is the first Arab woman to be nominated for 2 Academy Awards, and the primary Arab filmmaker in historical past to be nominated in a number of classes — an indication maybe that, ever so slowly, tales and voices lengthy unacknowledged in Western media would possibly lastly be heard.
Four Daughters at present in choose theaters nationwide.
