‘Four Daughters’ Director Kaouther Ben Hania Hates Reenactments. So She Found A Way To “Hack” Them For Her Award-Winning Documentary

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 several years, but struggled to find the best way to document their experience.

“In the beginning, I thought that I’ll do, I don’t know if I can call it a straightforward documentary, but kind of ‘fly on the wall’ documentary, filming Olfa and her two daughters in their home, thinking about the two other daughters,” Ben Hania tells Deadline. “But I realized quickly — and that’s why the project took so many years to come to life — that with this approach, I will not get to the multilayered dimension of the story.” 

She settled on an approach more in line with her background in narrative. “When you think about the past in general, in classical documentary, you think about reenactment, and I hate reenactment. So, I told myself, it’s such a cliché, I will hack it,” she remembers thinking. “I’ll use reenactment, but as I want it, and to serve the story.”

Ben Hania engaged two young actresses to play the missing daughters, and Hend Sabri, a star of Middle Eastern cinema, to play the compelling Olfa. The concept was not to fictionalize the story, but quite the opposite – to use the methods and process of acting to explore the truth of what the family had gone through.

“I know that actors are very good asking questions about character,” Ben Hania explains. “So, I told myself, when the actors meet with the real characters, they will be confronted with the reality, they will ask questions, they will react. The main idea was to insert cinema tools in the film to have a global vision, more kaleidoscopic vision for such a complex topic, such complex life, such complex characters.”

Instead of a conventional documentary talking head interview, we learn about Olfa and her daughters through their interactions with the actors.

“The idea wasn’t only to summon the past to bring it to life, but also to question it,” Ben Hania says, “to ask Olfa and her daughter’s questions and to give them the possibility to reflect on it too.”

Olfa speaks of growing up poor — how she became a weightlifter in her youth, to fight off any men who might try to sexually assault her mom or sisters. She describes battling her husband, who seemed to regard her as property, and later divorcing him. That left Olfa to raise four girls on her own.

Consistent with a culture preoccupied with the “purity” of girls and women, Olfa admits to fretting constantly that her daughters would become “whores” (a rather elastic term that, to her, encompassed flirting with boys). When Ghofrane entered a goth phase early in her teens, Olfa beat the girl so severely with a broom handle she thought she had killed her. 

These harsh anecdotes do not endear Olfa to the woman who plays her – Sabri. In the film, Sabri tells Olfa to her face that she’s alarmed by what she did to her kids.

“Hend is very rational. She says what she thinks, and she told me, ‘I don’t like Olfa’s character,’” Ben Hania says. “It was really interesting to see them interact, and it was very rich for the movie and to understand better Olfa’s character.”

That character, forged in a male-dominated culture, must be seen in context, Ben Hania says. 

“It’s a movie with women and they are strong women. Olfa is very strong. She doesn’t respect men. She’s not the kind of woman that will fear a man,” Ben Hania notes. But ironically – perhaps tragically would be a better word – Olfa could not avoid reproducing the mindset in which she was raised. “She’s like the guardian of patriarchy. And you have women like this, they perpetuate the patriarchy codes. We know that patriarchy is something that exists all over the world. We know that religion, and especially monotheistic religions, are very patriarchal. But also there is the common culture of patriarchy that is very, very old.”

The youngest two, Eya and Tayssir, express determination not to repeat their mother’s patterns. “When her daughters say they are trying to stop this malediction,” Ben Hania observes, “I think they’re talking about patriarchy.”

Ben Hania, along with Olfa, her daughters Eya and Tayssir and the cast of actors attended the Cannes Film Festival, where Four Daughters premiered in competition. (Ghofrane and Rahma remain imprisoned in Libya, where they were apprehended and tried for joining ISIS; Ghofrane has been raising a child behind bars).

Ben Hania says it was never her intention to make a separate fictionalized version of the family’s story. The reenactments she filmed were always in service of getting to the heart of what they experienced, in nonfiction form.

“The main idea,” she says, “was let’s engage together with the actresses in this process and to see what will happen.”