‘Four Daughters’ Director Kaouther Ben Hania Hates Reenactments. So She Found A Way To “Hack” Them For Her Award-Winning Documentary
27.11.2023 - 18:41
/ deadline.com
As the voting window for the Oscar shortlists approaches, Academy members are considering Kaouther Ben Hania’s film Four Daughters in not one, but two categories: Best Documentary Film and Best International Feature.
In August, Tunisia selected Ben Hania’s documentary as its official entry for International Film, the third time the director has been chosen for that honor, following 2017’s Beauty and the Dogs and 2020’s The Man Who Sold His Skin, which went on to earn an Oscar nomination. Both of those earlier films were narrative dramas, and there are dramatic elements in Four Daughters: Ben Hania enlisted three actresses to participate in her documentary.
Four Daughters tells the story of Olfa, a working-class Tunisian woman who raised four girls: Ghofrane, Rahma, Eya, and Tayssir. After the Arab Spring led to the ouster of Tunisia’s dictator in 2011, Islamic fundamentalism surged in the country. Olfa’s eldest – teenagers Ghofrane and Rahma – were swept up in the religious fervor and disappeared in 2015. Only later did it emerge they had joined ISIS in Libya and had been married off to militant leaders.
The case attracted huge attention in Tunisia and elsewhere (not least because of the beauty of Olfa’s daughters; in the film, Islamist men are heard swooning over Ghofrane after she adopted fundamentalist garb, her dark eyes neatly framed by the black niqab).
“Olfa did TV and radio interviews to tell the story of her daughters. I heard an interview with her on the radio and I was like, ‘I want to make a movie about it,’” Ben Hania recalls. “I contacted the journalist, and he gave me her number. It was like an impulse.”
That was back in 2016. The director says she became close to Olfa, Eya and Tayssir over the next