Year: 2023

Runtime: 107 minutes

Writer/director: Kaouther Ben Hania

Actors: Olfa Hamrouni, Eya Chikhaoui, Tayssir Chikhaoui, Nour Karoui, Ichraq Matar, Hend Sabri, Majd Mastoura

By Sarah Manvel

Four Daughters is half-documentary half-therapy, an unusual though not new hybrid style of film, and it succeeds because of an unusual level of frankness and bravery from the participants. Writer-director Kaouther Ben Hania clearly spent time working with the Chikhaoui family to for them to build this project together. Its importance is difficult to explain without spoilers, but suffice to say the two oldest of the four daughters, Rahma and Ghofrane, are gone. What went wrong and why is the subject of the film, which was made with the complete participation of the other Chikhaoui girls, Eya and Tayssir, along with their mother, Olfa Hamrouni.

The film is designed to re-enact their family life before Rahma and Ghofrane’s disappearance in order to work out why things happened the way they did. This meant bringing in actresses, Nour Karoui as Rahma and Ichraq Matar as Ghofrane. Their introduction to the real sisters was filmed, with great nerves all around, but immediately the younger sisters compliment the crew on capturing their older sisters’ essences, and eventually all four of the young women begin to like and trust one another in a very organic-feeling way. As a job for an actress this must be unbearably tough and it’s a huge compliment to Ms Karoui and Ms Matar that they are so easily accepted into their roles. 

Eya, Tayssir and Olfa also speak directly to the camera, separately and together, telling their side of the story, analysing their feelings and explaining how they’ve carried on. In the re-enactments sometimes Olfa plays herself and sometimes another actress, Hend Sabri (a superstar of Tunisian cinema), plays Olfa when the emotions were too tough for the real Olfa to revisit without distress. It’s complicated to describe but not to watch. In some scenes the three actresses and the three family members all chew over past behaviour together, for example discussing why this was said in that fight, or why Rahma and Ghofrane went from being westernised teens (Ghofrane was even a goth for a while) to wearing the hijab. And in this analysis the actresses sometimes directly take Olfa to task about her parenting choices, a level of personal criticism rarely captured on film and one that Olfa, to her credit, takes on the chin, though it is obviously very hard to hear. On the other hand, someone who reacted to a teenager waxing her legs by beating her so hard with a broom the handle breaks deserves all the criticism she gets.

When the girls were young things were difficult for all of them; Olfa’s family were no prizewinners and she married her husband, the daughters’ father, primarily to escape, but she had to run again when his abuse became unbearable. (All the men in the film are played by one actor, Majd Mastoura, which makes a sharp point about who was important in this family’s life.) There was a brief interlude with a new boyfriend Olfa loved with all her heart, but discovering what he was doing to her daughters ended that. Finally they found a period of greater stability, but then the girls became teenagers. And as teenagers around the world will do, everything their mother did was wrong, and they came up with ingenious ways to tease and torment her. 

Again, this is much more complicated to describe than it is to experience. Even in a world saturated with reality television and parlor analysis, the frankness and bravery of this family in confronting what happened demonstrates an unusual courage in ordinary human living. But that is because what happened to Rahma and Ghofrane is both jaw-droppingly awful and heartbreakingly ordinary – and the final reveal really twists the knife. How do you live in the face of such horror? How do you face the things that you did that led to such horror? How do you open your heart and mind to enable yourself to keep going? Well, many people don’t – they make excuses, self-medicate, crumble into self-pity and tell lies which deny any responsibility they might have had. But the happy confidence of Eya and Tayssir, who know exactly the value of human life and how close they came to losing theirs, is an incredible testament to the power of the truth, even when it hurts. And in being so open with their story, they leave open the possibility of change, for others and for themselves.