Four Daughters (2023)
Tunisia's post-revolution years produced a wave of filmmaking that wrestled openly with what had been suppressed for decades: questions of religion, gender, state violence, and family. Four Daughters (2023) sits within that tradition while doing something altogether more unusual with it. The film begins from a real and almost unbearable fact: Olfa Hamrouni, a Tunisian mother of four, watched her two eldest daughters leave for Libya in 2015, recruited by Daesh. Rather than make a conventional documentary about radicalisation, director Kaouther Ben Hania devised a form that sits somewhere between therapy session, rehearsal, and cinema. Olfa and her two surviving daughters, Eya and Tayssir Chikhaoui, appear as themselves, while professional actresses are brought in to stand in for the absent girls and, at times, for Olfa herself. It is a formally adventurous approach, and one that raises uncomfortable questions about the ethics of reconstructing trauma on camera, questions the film is shrewd enough to ask of itself out loud.
Ben Hania is no stranger to finding ambitious formal solutions to difficult subjects. Her previous feature, The Man Who Sold His Skin, used a high-concept art-world premise to examine what it means to commodify a refugee's body, and earned Tunisia's first ever Academy Award nomination for Best International Feature Film. Four Daughters is a more personal and rawer piece of work, co-produced across France, Germany, Saudi Arabia, and Tunisia, with backing from the Red Sea International Film Festival Fund, which has in recent years become an important source of financing for Arab cinema. The film premiered at Cannes in 2023, where it won the L'Oeil d'or prize for best documentary, a category in which it fits only loosely, which is rather the point. To see how another Arab production backed by similar regional funding handles questions of women's lives and faith, Ben Hania's near-contemporary Wadjda makes for an interesting comparison, as does the way Bosnian cinema processed collective trauma through a single woman's story in Quo Vadis, Aida?, a film that similarly refuses to let its audience off the emotional hook.
The casting is central to the whole enterprise. Hend Sabri, one of the most recognisable actresses in Arab cinema, plays an older, more composed version of Olfa, creating an odd doubling effect as she sits beside the real woman. It is a performance that requires considerable delicacy: too polished, and it would undercut the rawness of the actual family; too naturalistic, and the distinction between documentary and fiction collapses entirely. The two younger Chikhaoui daughters, Eya and Tayssir, play themselves, which is to say they play young women still processing something they may not fully understand yet, while Nour Karoui and Ichraq Matar take on the roles of the absent elder sisters. The result is a cast that is part family, part ensemble, and part therapeutic group, performing alongside one another in ways that are occasionally awkward and often genuinely moving.
There is a very specific, fascinating subgenre of cinema that blurs the line between documentary and performance, using real-life trauma as a vehicle for on-screen catharsis. I’ve sat through a fair few of these. Think Cachada: The Opportunity, 1001 Frames, or Salaam Cinema, where the camera captures actual victims processing their pain through the lens of acting.
Kaouther Ben Hania’s 2023 film Four Daughters slots perfectly into this hybrid space, tackling the unimaginable tragedy of a Tunisian mother, Olfa, whose two eldest daughters were radicalised and swept away by Daesh. By casting the brilliant Hend Sabri to play the older version of Olfa, alongside the real Olfa Hamrouni and her two surviving daughters, Ben Hania creates a deeply unconventional, highly compelling setup.
What makes the picture so gripping is how it parcels out its information. The film very slowly reveals the harrowing details of what actually happened to the missing girls, restricting the narrative entirely to the perspectives of the mother and the two younger sisters left behind. It’s a brilliant structural choice that turns the runtime into a slow-burn emotional excavation. Honestly, the emotions on display are raw and incredibly clear, hitting you right in the chest. It is a deeply touching and emotive experience, forcing the audience to sit in the room with these women as they reconstruct a family tragedy that defies comprehension.
However, I’ll be honest, the film isn't just a straightforward tearjerker, and that’s largely because of the central figure herself. As the layers are peeled back, the treatment of Olfa towards her surviving daughters (and the sheer, unvarnished coldness she occasionally shows them) becomes genuinely shocking. You go in expecting to purely sympathise with a grieving mother, but Ben Hania refuses to sanitise her subject. Olfa is flawed, sometimes cruel, and deeply complicated, which adds a fascinating, uncomfortable layer to the docufiction. It prevents the film from becoming a simple, one-note sob story, even if it makes the family dynamics a bit of a mess to untangle emotionally.
This is a cracking, deeply affecting piece of world cinema that uses its experimental format to ask profound questions about memory, motherhood, and radicalisation. Ben Hania has crafted a highly watchable, emotionally resonant film that lingers long after the credits roll, even if the matriarch's own toxic traits make it a challenging watch. It’s a brave, brilliant, and thoroughly engaging examination of a devastating reality.
Four Daughters is a film that earns its reputation not through spectacle but through a willingness to sit in discomfort and stay there. Ben Hania's docufiction format, sometimes called the "cinema of confrontation" by critics of North African film, has precedents, but few recent examples push it quite this far into morally unresolved territory. The structural choice to restrict perspective to those left behind, rather than to attempt any account of the disappeared daughters themselves, gives the film a disciplined focus that many similarly themed works lack. What emerges is a portrait of a family shaped by forces, patriarchal, political, and religious, that no individual entirely understands or controls. Audiences who found the formal experiments of Goodbye to Language rewarding for their questioning of how cinema represents reality may find a different but kindred provocation here. It is not an easy watch, but then films that genuinely mean something rarely are. The most honest thing you could say about Four Daughters is that it stays with you precisely because it refuses to be resolved.
Rating: ★★★★ | Year: 2023 | Watched: 2026-07-21
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Four Daughters (2023) on YouTube
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