20/05/2023 - CANNES 2023: Kaouther Ben Hania shines a light on the complex place that women occupy in Tunisia through the story of a family and an original hybridation between documentary and fiction

“You will have to feel everything I felt, the pain of separation, the anguish of disappearance.” Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania likes to take strong inspiration from reality in order to mould fiction that denounces the failings of the contemporary world, as she already demonstrated with brio notably with Beauty and the Dogs [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Kaouther Ben Hania
film profile] and The Man Who Sold His Skin [+see also:
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interview: Kaouther Ben Hania
film profile], but she also has a searching spirit when it comes to cinematic experience. With Four Daughters [+see also:
trailer
interview: Kaouther Ben Hania
film profile], presented in competition at the 76th Cannes Film Festival, the director pushed even further her desire to erase the frontiers between genres and to be as realistic as possible. Creating a setup that totally orchestrates the encounter between documentary and fiction, she invites actresses to portray absent women (and for the reenactment of the toughest episodes) and mixes them together with the other, real protagonists of the story, all in a mise en scene that openly reveals the artifice but which also, paradoxically, brings out even more truth.

A moment for make-up, some costume fitting: the film never hides its “theatrical” nature, but instead stimulates it, letting exchanges occur between Olfa Hamrouni and her two daughters still living by her side (Tayssir and Eya Chikhaoui) and the actresses (Ichraq Matar and Nour Karoui) playing the older daughters Ghofrane and Rhama (who have been “devoured by the wolf” as their mother states at the beginning of the film), as well as Hend Sabri who replaces Olfa when necessary. The set and the backstage area merge, the script and the seemingly spontaneous conversations intertwine, we ask to cut some takes, we cry, we laugh, we call for the director, then we continue. One would have to be quite smart to distinguish the authentic from the fabricated throughout this story centred on the intimacy of a family chronicle and interspersed by a few TV archives retracing Turkey’s recent history (the fall of Ben Ali, the revolution) and discussed by the six protagonists.

At the heart of this process reigns Olfa, who tells the story of her life, testifying to the camera about her previous existence with her own mother, her marriage and the very physical struggle for it not to be consummated, then the birth of her daughters (four ultrasounds in split screen), her refound freedom in the context of the Jasmine revolution in 2011 with an escape to Sousse before her divorce, and her coup de foudre for a criminal becoming the tender but in fact horrific second father to the girls. A woman’s journey full of generational repetition of violence and which pushed Olfa’s profound toughening up towards men who truly deserve all the ill we hear of them during the film. Meanwhile, the four daughters grow up and struggle despite their mother's absolute but ultra possessive and traditional love for them. And when the eldest try to emancipate, they fall into radical hands…

Based on interaction and a true hybridisation, Four Daughters is a very surprising oeuvre, a stripping down to the wire of a lot of suffering and of a salutary liberation through speech from a deeply rooted schema of societal oppression of women, whose exit doors sometimes reveal themselves to be even worse deadends, but where hope and energy prove to be impressively resilient, beyond the blows that life gives. A film that is also the mirror of the turmoil of maternal and filial love to which Kaouther Ben Hania pays the most beautiful homage by filming faces and emotions up close, in the trust and complicity of women.

Produced by French outfit Tanit Films, Tunisian company Cinétéléfilms and German outfit Twenty Twenty Vision, and coproduced by ZDF/Arte, Four Daughters is sold internationally by The Party Film Sales.

(Translated from French)