FOUR DAUGHTERS (2023) - Mark Reviews Movies

Four Daughters, Kino Lorber

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 26, 2023

Olfa Hamrouni, a woman living in Tunisia, has four daughters, but we only see two them with her at the start of Kaourther Ben Hania's documentary. They stand beside their mother, and in the backdrop, a pair of actors representing the other two stand, bathed in red or blue light. Four Daughters, then, begins as a mystery: What happened to these other two young women?

As soon as Ben Hania's film begins to speak of the politics of the country, the answer to that mystery more or less becomes a known quantity. The real question becomes what pushed those two women away from their family and toward radicalism.

For that, there are no simple or easy answers, but regardless and through expected and unanticipated challenges to the search, the director attempts to get at them. The obvious barriers here include the fact that the two daughters, being absent, are unable to speak for themselves. Hamrouni and the other daughters, Tayssir and Eya, can recount what the two women said and did, while speculating about the thinking behind those words and actions. That, though, presents the key challenge that Ben Hania doesn't appear to anticipate: These three, especially the mother, might not be the most reliable narrators of this familial experience.

How does a filmmaker get around this? Here, the director probes and prods as much as she's comfortable with doing, in order to maintain her subjects' trust and to retain some sense of objectivity. By a seemingly happy accident, though, the director has also hired actors to play both Hamrouni and the two absent daughters. Some of the dramatic re-creations she has planned might be too traumatic for Hamrouni to perform, and in those cases, the actress Hind Sabri will take over for the mother, while two others, Nour Karoui and Ichrak Matar, will play the absent daughters, Rhama and Ghofrane.

What happens, though, is that Hamrouni often deflects and omits details about what she did and why she did it. This means Sabri, who wants to understand the character she's portraying, often takes over in the roles Ben Hania wisely wants to avoid: as an armchair psychologist, as an interrogator, and, in some instances, as a judge for Hamrouini, whose own religious views and behavior in regards to her children might have more to do with what happened than she's willing to realize or admit.

The result is fascinating, because of the pointed blending of non-fiction and a drama that might be based on the fictions the mother has created for herself, and, as it should be, discomforting, because the facts of this case remain—no matter the cause. Four Daughters may play with blurred lines and narrative uncertainty, but harsh truths—such as the ones of the methods of radicalization, as well as the consequences of it, and the ways in which the pain of each generation passes to the next—still emerge with clarity.

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