"Four Daughters" seeks to understand radicalization by ISIS: "People can go to the side of darkness"

Kaouther Ben Hania’s documentary, “Four Daughters” explores the trauma a Tunisian family experienced after Olfa Hamrouni’s eldest daughters, Rahma and Ghofrane, joined ISIS. The film uses actresses Nour Karoui and Ichrak Matar, respectively, to portray Rahma and Ghofrane, and Tunisian actress Hind Sabri plays Olfa, “when scenes are too upsetting.” (Sabri is frequently on-screen.) Olfa’s youngest daughters, Eya and Tayssir, play themselves. Significantly, Majd Mastoura plays all the male roles — Olfa’s husband, Wissem, a man she falls in love with, and an authority figure. 

Eya and Tayssir are seen admiring the spot-on casting of their on-screen siblings, but this approach is not a gimmick. Ben Hania uses this layering to provide an opportunity for Olfa and her daughters to confront trauma through reenactment. Watching the family recount their lives and experiences in this meta production is fascinating. They work through their emotions in scenes that reflect on abuse and oppression. The actors rehearse line readings and work out motivations for accuracy. In one segment, an actor stops a scene and leaves.  

The episodes depicted include an unbelievable moment on Olfa’s wedding night where she resists her husband’s advances, and her own sister comes in and advises her husband to block Olfa in the corner for deflowering. Olfa, who learned self-defense, kicks her husband and wipes his blood on a sheet to fake losing her virginity.

It is one of many powerful examples of how women are treated, and Olfa is not always easy on her daughters. However, the pain she feels losing her eldest children to radicalization is powerful, and it is an effort for Olfa, Eya, and Tayssir to put the past behind them.

Ben Hania spoke with Salon about her documentary, which is Tunisia’s submission for the 2024 international feature film Oscar.

How did you meet with Olfa and get her to trust you to tell her story, and potentially retraumatize her and her daughters? Why put them through that? 

I met Olfa in 2016. She was telling her story back then on TV and radio in Tunisia. I heard her story, and I knew I wanted to do a documentary. I found her fascinating with all her contradictions. I wanted the opportunity to understand how a tragedy like this can happen in a family. I contacted her, and at first, she thought I was a journalist. She said after talking to journalists, she and her daughters were attacked on social media.

I said I wanted to make a documentary. I got to know Olfa and the daughters and shot some fly-on-the-wall footage, but it wasn’t good enough. I thought this project is too complex; it’s like a minefield. I was about to quit. I went off and made “The Man Who Sold His Skin.” But I was still in contact with them, because I was someone they could talk to who was not judging them. I knew it was important to summon the past to understand it. I had this idea of bringing in actors and hijacking the cliché of reenactment. I shared this with Olfa and her daughters, and they found it really interesting. They are natural-born storytellers, so for them, it was very important that their voices could be heard after their previous bad experience with media.

What informed your decision to approach the film in the way you did by using actors? 

I don’t like reenactment. What was interesting for me was to question Olfa and her daughters; that the actors ask questions about their motivations and to have this kind of Brechtian discussion — we are inside the scene and the memory. This cinematic device gave me the opportunity to reflect the memory and explore the complexities of this multilayered story.

What observations do you have about the relationship between the sisters? They are very close, with the older daughters being role models for the younger ones. But they also have their differences and distinct personalities.

They are individual and part of one family, like any family all over the world. I never met the real older sisters. What I quickly understood was that the older sister, Ghofrane, was like Eya. She is very feminine and beautiful and girly. The other sister, Rahma was like Tayssir, more masculine, more audacious. This is what the younger girls told me. So, there was mirroring between the absent sister and the present sister.  The younger sisters’ lives changed completely because of the fate of the older sisters.

The wedding night sequence is quite powerful with physical and verbal abuse, but there is an interesting sequence involving an exorcism. Can you talk about selecting the episodes that made up the film’s content?

My main question when I wanted to do this movie was to understand why and dig deep in the history of this family and this country to explain the visible part of the iceberg, this tragedy. All these elements gave me a clue to understanding. So in the wedding night, with its brutality, we see this extraordinary duality: love and hate, violence and caring. When we talk about wedding, we talk about love. When we talk about motherhood, we think of something warm. We don’t have those elements in this story.

Olfa’s sister’s behavior was shocking.

When we were shooting the [wedding] scene, I didn’t know about the sister’s story. Olfa remembered it, and the actor asked her how to play the sister. It works. We start shooting and we discover what really happened. It’s not scripted. Olfa said, it is her life. There are some women who are guardians of the patriarchy. Olfa is the victim of this oppression, but she reproduces it towards her daughters. She calls it “The curse.”

One of the most revealing scenes has Olfa and her daughters talk about Tayssir’s misleading photo of a (bent) leg that resembles a butt crack. A later sequence, where the daughters talk candidly about their breasts and periods and leg waxing is upsetting to Olfa, who thinks everything relating to the female body is shameful and obscene. To me, it shows how women self-suppress, which is telling. What are your thoughts on this topic and how it informed Olfa’s relationship with her daughters?

Yes, because of Olfa’s upbringing, she had this idea about obliging her daughters — they don’t have a father, he is absent, alcoholic. Olfa is playing a father figure. If she does this, she will save her daughters from what their father was telling them when they were young, that they will turn into prostitutes. Olfa was scared this might happen. The classic accusation for women is that they are either a mother or a whore. There is this pressure on a lot of young girls in every society. It goes beyond the cultural context of the film. The film is universal — it is about growing up and mother/daughter relationships and coming of age in a very difficult way. 

There are also several scenes that show the daughters talking about the hajib and niqab. The headscarf is a political symbol of resistance and rebellion. Can you talk about this debate?

It can seem counterintuitive because we always think about hajib and hiding as a submissive act for women, but in this context and in a Tunisian context, it is a way to oppress the oppressor — which is their mother. Talking about the mother/whore dichotomy, they understood quickly that they had to conform by wearing the hajib with all its symbolism, but also, with this tool, they could accuse their mother of being less Muslim than them. It was a tool of their rebellion but also a tool to oppress their mother, who was their oppressor.

Can you discuss why you portray the radicalization of Rahma and Ghofrane in the way you did? There are news clips that address their actions, but it is more the impact of what they have done that is the focus here, and not how they were indoctrinated. 

We see in the film that they put on the veil, and then there is a process. They oblige their younger sisters to wear the veil and they become zealots. We see a scene of their game about death. They learned this somewhere. It was important to cover yourself as proof of your devoutness and start thinking about death in this [teenage] stage of life. Given their background — they come from a complicated dysfunctional family with a lot of abuse — the real liberation was to quickly die, because life is unbearable, and go to heaven where everything is harmonious. It’s not about lecturing them, it is about being receptive to the first offer they get, even if it’s horrible. 

The film is a cautionary tale about the way women are victims and also vulnerable. What do you want audiences to understand having seen “Four Daughters.” Are we supposed to be sympathetic, or fear them?

Audiences can take away whatever they want. We forget how ordinary people can go to the side of darkness. In Europe, we see it with fascism where a lot of young people are fascinated with this ideology. Everyone is afraid of being “with or against.” They don’t try to understand the bigger scheme, to recognize that all of us have dark sides. I wanted to understand without judgment.

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Do you think this film has or will help Olfa, Eya, and Tayssir put their past behind them?

Yes. When I started, I underestimated the cathartic, therapeutic aspect. But I saw it while shooting. It enabled Eya and Tayssir to say things to their mother and she was obliged to hear because they were surrounded by [a film crew]. We created a safe space to talk. They felt better after the movie. When they saw the film, I was scared they would not like it, because it is very sensitive at times, but they were really proud of it and thanked me for giving them a voice. Their relationship as mother and daughters got better. Olfa is not the same violent mom. She had a lot of regret and understood things more clearly after doing further introspective work. She is an intelligent woman blinded by her wounds and her upbringing. But it was an amazing journey to do this movie with them and to see them growing up. They can’t put the past behind them because the story is still continuing.  

“Four Daughters” opens Oct. 27 in select cities, with additional cities to follow.