CANNES REVIEW: Four Daughters, Les Filles D’Olfa, New Docudrama, Premieres at Cannes

Writer and director Kaouther Ben Hania (Beauty and the Dogs and The Man Who Sold His Skin) brings Four Daughters and the story of Olfa Hamrouni and her daughters, two of which are lost to ISIS, to rave reviews as it premieres at the Cannes Film Festival as an Official Selection In Competition.

Olfa, a Tunisian woman and mother of four daughters, grapples with the loss of two of her eldest daughters to ISIS in this thrilling drama part documentary on the close-knit lives of her family that was torn apart by the religious brainwashing and conditioning of the political and militant party.

Four Daughters focuses on a film that is being made in which two actresses are selected to play the missing daughters, the two remaining daughters Eya and Tayssir Chikhaoui, as well as Olfa, who is coaching Hend Sabri the actress that portrays her.

The film weaves in and out of real vs. fiction as Olfa is forced to reenact many of the moving and turbulent moments in her and her daughter’s lives and still experience the pain of the loss of not only her two daughters but also a granddaughter who one of her daughters has had since succumbing to the militant abduction of her adult children.

When hearing of Olfa’s story and deciding to start the project and film her and her two remaining daughters, director Ben Hania found that the mother was falling into the trap of playing on clichés and performing to a standard of what she was already exposed to with all of her tv interviews, in a way of telling her story from the very tragic standpoint.

Ben Hania stopped production and brought in actors to play the missing daughters to encourage memories to be full circle moments, the good, the bad, and the ugly simultaneously, and the result was a dynamic view of a mother and her daughters and the beauty, love, and compassion that came with her raising her daughters juxtaposed to the tragic and violent disappearance of two girls deemed quite unsuspectable to such a tragic outcome. Four Duaghters shares the vibrant life of Olfa’s family mixed with the hardships and abuses from the girls father which were relentless.

Ben Hania explains in her statement to the press, “I realized that the best way to put Olfa back into the domain of reality and of her own memories was to make a documentary on the preparation for a fake fiction that would never see the light of day. Based on everything that Olfa had told me, I drafted a script involving Eya and Tayssir on the preparation of a fiction in which the actors would meet the real protagonists to better express what they had lived through.”

She continued, “My role in this film was that of director, that of guiding them, searching with them while Olfa recounted and analyzed significant episodes in her life in great detail. By asking her questions about specific details, and her motivations, Hend Sabri allows Olfa to reflect on her past without indulging her. If Olfa had remained alone with me, she would have just served up the same story, the same cliché, again.”

Ben Hania has just one male actor play all of the men in the film. She explained that men get ejected from Olfa’s life and the lives of her daughters, so one male actor representing them all as one man made sense. Majd Mastoura became overwhelmed on set during a scene which had dialogue on past experiences of the girls calling out their father for his implied sexual abuse. Mastoura asked to cut and speak with the director off set.

Ben Hania chose to keep these scenes in the film to show how actors can become affected by the reality of the content matter. As a side note, a psychologist who was consulted with by Olfa and her daughters, stated some things were best suited to remain private between doctor and patient and not exposed on film. One of Olfa’s daughters, Eya, expressed that the scene should remain in the film. Four Duaghters has an enormous nod to Brechtian theater where the audience becomes part of the experience they are viewing and the walls of the artist are removed.

The film gives a multifacted glimpse into the lives of this Tunisian family and is also a journey through the girls’ coming of age and adolescence and the factors such as religion, loss, sexuality, patriarchy among other things, that contributed to shaping their lives. Four Daughters opened to rave reviews with a deserved standing ovation for a visibly moved Olfa, her daughters, Ben Hania and the remaining cast at the Cannes Film Festival.