“Reenactment as Negotiation”
Nora Stone (University of North Alabama)
Olfa comes home from working abroad to her four daughters. She singles out her oldest—Ghofrane—and inspects her new hairstyle, a bob dyed blue. She rips open Ghofrane’s tights, revealing waxed legs. “What else have you waxed? Answer me. You’ve become a woman?” Olfa’s voice rises with accusations, and she beats Ghofrane around the head. In the final shot of the scene, Ghofrane’s face is bloody and tear-stained. Olfa pants from the effort. Fade to grainy footage of an Islamic State member calling on women to adopt the hijab and follow Islamic law. Ghofrane does. She and her sister Rahma eventually run away to join the Islamic State.
Why would a woman join the Islamic State? What could be attractive about sharia law and terror cells? This is the question that Four Daughters (Kaouther Ben Hania, 2023) addresses, convincingly and compassionately, through intense reenactments and frank discussions with the members of Olfa’s family.
The film does not perform an objectively digested analysis of the phenomenon. Rather, Four Daughters takes an emotional tack, exploring the question from inside one family. The result is a profoundly intimate, engrossing portrait of women responding to massive cultural and political shifts. Their responses are so particular that by the end, the viewer understands Ghofrane and Rahma’s decision to become jihadists. The film’s great accomplishment is to show how people’s choices are not reducible to radical beliefs but are rooted in interpersonal relationships and the pressures of daily life.
Fluidity between artifice and actuality is Four Daughters’ most unique feature. Olfa, Eya, and Tayssir act out scenes from their past alongside actors playing the lost daughters, Rahma and Ghofrane. Well-known Tunisian-Egyptian actor Hend Sabri often stands in for Olfa, as well, in scenes Olfa deems too upsetting to enact. But this is not a psychodramatic trick to elicit remorse from the perpetrators, as in The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2012). That film walks a tightrope by forcing a mass murderer to process his evil deeds. In contrast, Four Daughters is structured around three women who have thought deeply about the past and their part in it. They appear mentally healthy and vibrant, and they are eager to explore what transpired in their family.
Nor are the reenactments mere visualizations of an unfilmed past, as they often are in true-crime documentaries. The reenactments are, rather, an arena for negotiation. Olfa, Eya, and Tayssir collaborate with Ben Hania to get closer to the truth. Olfa asks actor Sabri about her acting process, wondering how she handles portraying difficult emotions. Sabri questions Olfa about her motivations in specific scenes. This is functional—so Sabri can understand the character she is playing—but she also acts as a real interlocutor. Sabri asks Olfa what any viewer may wonder: Why did you kick out your 8-year-old for taking a photo that looked like a buttcrack (but is actually a photo of her folded leg)? How could you beat your teenaged daughter with a hose and a broomstick, until she stopped moving, because she got her legs waxed and hair bobbed? Olfa explains that fear for her daughters’ future drove her actions. And she voices her values: her daughters’ bodies belong to their future husbands. She doesn’t wriggle away from the hard questions. Nor are Eya and Tayssir cowed by Olfa—they push back and tell their mother what they believe: that their bodies belong to themselves, alone.
At times, the reenactments are so harrowing that the professional actors cannot go on. For example, Eya and Tayssir reveal that their mother’s lover Wissem, a convicted murderer, sexually abused them. They reenact a moment when Wissem lies on a bed in a drugged stupor, as they hover above him with a knife. The actor playing Wissem, Majd Mastoura, asks for a break, saying sternly that he needs to talk to Ben Hania outside, alone, away from cameras. Evidently, he is worried for the young women play-acting such a horrible scene from their past. Eya and Tayssir remain in the room and reassure the camera operator that they can do the scene. Eya says she has acted this scene before, many times, with psychologists. Her reassurances give way to Tayssir’s tears. She cries and admits that she cannot hate Wissem, even after his abuse and betrayals. This dizzying mix of emotion, and blend of artifice and confession, foregrounds the complexity of the girls’ experience. Gaining access to the creation process allows us to feel the fullness of their humanity and to understand the characters better.
While the reenactments are dramatic arenas for negotiating family history, Ben Hania also mines emotional truth and characterization from less-charged moments of the filmmaking process. Near the start of the film, Olfa, Eya and Tayssir meet the actors who will play the lost daughters, Rahma and Ghofrane. They are visibly delighted by the casting, cooing especially about how much the actor resembles Ghofrane. They are pleased and surprised, smiling and laughing, but also tugged toward sadness at the loss of their beloved sisters. All five women—the real mother and daughters, and the actors playing their sisters—pose together for a family photo. Dressed in black, glamourous lighting picks them out on a crimson couch in an aqua dressing room. As they gaze at the actors playing their lost sisters, Eya and Tayssir begin to cry. The artifice of the situation does not stop their pain from bubbling up.
The artful mise-en-scene draws parallels with other stories of the girls’ extreme reactions to parental control. In one scene, the four daughters loll together in their house clothes on a daybed and floor cushions. Bathed in soft light, singing, laughing, discussing breasts and periods, they closely resemble the Lisbon sisters in Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides (1999). Locked away from the world by their strict parents, the Lisbon girls all die by suicide. Then Olfa enters, chides them and begins hitting Eya, until Ben Hania stops her. Olfa walks away, smiles and says, “What a bunch of whores.” If your own mother will punish you for your femaleness, the scene implies, why not punish her by running away to join the Islamic State? They turned her own fear and judgment around on her. As Olfa says in an interview, “I taught them to aim, and they shot me. I taught them to be strong, and they defeated me.”
Teenage rebellion takes many forms. Four Daughters probes a particularly high-stakes, historically-specific version—the turn toward extremism. It is painful to watch Ghofrane and Rahma assert youthful agency by embracing radical Islam. But in interviews throughout, the film shows unexpected consequences of this rebellion. Olfa’s family survived. Olfa takes accountability, admitting that her enactment of her own generational trauma is responsible, in part, for her daughters’ radicalization. Eya and Tayssir go through deprogramming and renounce extremism. And they still express deep love for their lost sisters. The family’s response is so heartfelt and resolute. Even though the older sisters are currently imprisoned in Libya for affiliating with the Islamic State, their mother and younger sisters glow with hope.
“Decoding Private Truths”
Florence Martin (Goucher College)
Kaouther Ben Hania’s critically acclaimed documentary Four Daughters (Best Documentary at Cannes, 14 other awards in Europe, a 2024 Oscar nomination) unfolds a surface narrative in three acts:
- 2011 – The Tunisian revolution ousts the leader of the country. Olfa does “her own revolution” and divorces her husband, the father of her four girls.
- 2013 – Saudi preachers descend on their neighborhood and convince the girls to wear the niqab (a black head-to-toe veil dissonant with the traditional Tunisian white safsaris). Within two years, the oldest daughters leave the family: Ghofrane joins Daesh (an extremist, terrorist Muslim group), followed by Rahma, who marries a wanted terrorist.
- 2015 – News reports throw Olfa and her two remaining daughters into the spotlight. Via TV interview, Olfa declares: “the eldest, Rahma and Ghofrane, have been devoured by the wolves.”
When Olfa, a divorced mother of four of modest means (she cleans houses to make a living) shares her grief on TV, something about her fascinates Ben Hania. She wants to tell the story of those left behind rather than the story of the departed daughters. She also wants to pry Olfa’s character away from the preset frames established by the media around a guilty, mourning mother. Yet, she clearly intends her film to do more than revise or correct a media representation and weaves a counter-narrative. She invites Olfa and her two remaining daughters to dig deep into their shared past and aims for a new, polyvocal narrative spiraling around the older sisters’ disappearance. Olfa, Eya, and Tayssir thus take soli in turn to relate their story of the family before and after the event, thereby re-orienting the focus of the documentary and our gaze away from the transnationally political (Daesh and its terrorists) and towards female intimacy. The documentary no longer asks the obvious question: how do young women get radicalized by an extremist religious group? But, rather: what paths are available to young women to escape the oppression of a family? How does a family of women manage to replicate patriarchal violence generation after generation? What appropriate form can a documentary create to tell such a multidimensional story?
First, Ben Hania devises a cinematic apparatus that transcends the usual borders of a documentary. She invites famous Tunisian actors Hind Sabri and Majd Mastoura to help the characters reveal their “inner truth” by acting out, alongside Olfa and her daughters, the events that led the girls to leave. Hind is Olfa when it gets too hard for the latter to relive painful events. Majd plays the role of the male characters in the film: Abderrahmane (Olfa’s first husband and the father of the girls), and Wissem (her lover after the divorce). Two other actresses perform the disappeared sisters. Yet, the camera often focuses on exchanges between the actors and the characters as they are telling their past rather than on enactments of past events. Here, Ben Hania shares Abbas Kiarostami’s view of cinema: a film may lie, but it must always unearth a profound truth in the process. Four Daughters dances with meta-cinema: we see Hind Sabri, exasperated by Olfa’s violent behavior, argue with her, then hold her in a tight embrace, the two visually merging into a bicephalous woman whose contradictions are superseded by love. We also hear Majd say “cut!” as he finds himself at his emotional edge, unable to play the role of Wissem turned abusive stepfather. The documentary’s effect and affect are literally stunning: we feel Hind’s and Majd’s raw emotions as they reluctantly perform parental roles that sometimes reach inhumane excesses. The viewer is then given access to the breadth of intimate violence via the struggle of the actors approximating that very violence. This meta-cinematic handling of emotions has several consequences.
One of its effects is to illuminate Ben Hania’s take on women’s violence against women: in dramatic close-ups, she shows the intergenerational chain of vicious abuse committed by both men and women on girls. During the film, Olfa imputes her own extremely rough treatment of her daughters to her experience of abuse growing up, when she learned to physically defend herself, her sisters, and her mother. Rude and ferocious, Olfa often ruled over her daughters with an iron hand, having integrated the patriarchal discourse and violence to which she herself had fallen victim and reproduced that same violence onto her daughters, which we see reenacted in a few brutal scenes. She beats her daughters and insults them in sequences shot in extreme close-ups. The images are shocking, the violence literally in the viewer’s face. Yet, even as the film explains its origins, it does not judge Olfa’s behavior.
Similarly, rather than seeking to explain the reasons for the daughters’ departure, the film unearths the logic of violence and rebellion that overtakes the protagonists in the private sphere – Olfa calls it the “curse” of violence transmitted from mother to daughter for generations. Within this logic, Olfa’s daughters’ “re-veiling” (donning the Salafist black niqab) signals neither a politico-cultural claim nor a faith-based commitment to extremist Islam. In Tunisia, where the veil was banned after independence, wearing a veil was a sign of resistance. The daughters opt to veil as an act of rebellion against their mother’s authoritarian regime, joining Daesh being the next step in a mortiferous self-liberation. The trade in oppression, while not a suicidal move (Rahma gives birth to Fatma on whose face the film will end) will nonetheless lead to the death of many and even perhaps of themselves.
Finally, the paradoxical truth of the film lies in its use of meta-cinema (interacting actors and characters) to expose the brutal treatment of women at the hands of a (patriarchal) matriarch which led, almost inadvertently, to her daughters joining (male) international terrorism. Focusing on Olfa, who drank the patriarchal Kool-Aid and reproduced its inherited violence onto her daughters, Ben Hania focused her camera away from the usual male perpetrators of violence to denounce a female perpetrator right at home, right in the women’s private rooms (we often see the daughters in their shared bedroom). Ben Hania does not exonerate the men in the film yet complicates women’s responsibility in cultural transmission and, through her polyvocal narrative structure, offers an alternative model: female and pluralistic, relying on empathy and thereby breaking away from the shackles of the intergenerational transmission of a violent culture.
DOCALOGUE 