‘A very emotional shoot’: behind Four Daughters, an unusual, Oscar-tipped film

Four Daughters, a surreal blend of documentary, memory, meta-fictional re-enactment and therapy now shortlisted for an Oscar, originated years ago: in 2016, when a Tunisian woman named Olfa Hamrouni took to local news to call out her country’s failure to combat the scourge of Isis. And the year before that, when her two radicalized eldest daughters, Ghofrane and Rahma Chikhaoui, fled to join the group in Libya. And the years before that, when Hamrouni struggled to raise her four daughters – the two eldest, rebellious and fiery; the two youngest, keen sponges of conflict – with an iron fist and a housekeeper’s salary.

Related: Four Daughters review – fact and fiction mix in mother’s heartbreak over Islamic State

Hamrouni first caught the eye of Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania on the news, pleading with authorities to repatriate her daughters from a Libyan prison in which they’ve been detained on suspicion of terrorist activities (and after a US anti-terror strike killed Rahma’s husband in 2016). Ben Hania was impressed by “her ability to tell her story”, she said. Hamrouni and her two younger daughters, Eya and Tayssir, “have the right words to describe their feelings, their story, their evolution of events”.

Ben Hania, a feature film-maker with a background in documentary, sought “to dig behind those clips – that factual event – to dig into the past of this family” initially through a straightforward verité documentary. But she found the format insufficient in capturing the complexity of the situation, an emotional understanding of what would motivate Ghofrane and Rahma, teenage goths turned fundamentalists, to leave. The footage wasn’t good enough. (Hamrouni agreed, she said.) Years passed. Ben Hania gained international acclaim for her 2020 Arabic-language feature The Man Who Sold His Skin, nominated for a best international feature Oscar. She had her pick of projects yet returned to Tunisia, to speak again with Hamrouni and her two remaining daughters with a different approach: what if they hired actors to play the missing sisters?

Four Daughters begins with this strange communion of fact and fiction, memory and performance: Eya and Tayssir, 11 and 8 when their sisters left and now in their late teens, meet actors Ichraq Matar and Nour Karoui, watch them don niqabs as Ghofrane and Rahma; all agree there’s a resemblance. The joyful reassembly of the family unit with Hamrouni quickly shifts to tears; Hamrouni is replaced with her own double, played by the Tunisian-Egyptian actor Hend Sabri, who confers with Hamrouni on how to play her memories. (A single man, Majd Mastoura, plays all the male roles – Hamrouni’s deadbeat husband / the girls’ alcoholic father, Hamrouni’s predatory ex-boyfriend, a Tunisian police officer – a decision of convenience also indicative of men’s disposability to this family.)

Ben Hania was not a fan of re-enactment, the convention often used in documentary to frequently cheap, cheesy or distracting effect. “It’s fiction, it’s not documentary,” she said of the practice. Along with Hamrouni, Eya and Tayssir, she imagined something different: the women staging, even directing, re-enactments of their memories to accompany their first-person testimony, a search for catharsis, clarity, or just some control through hybrid performance. (It helped that Hamrouni, long accused of faking her story, assumed that, ironically, her words would be more believed if a known actor like Sabri delivered them.) “I thought about hijacking the cliche and using it in another way,” said Ben Hania. “Using it like in theater – we are in the scene, trying to re-enact a memory from the past, so we bring the past to the present but also we question this memory.”

The experiment has porous boundaries; on camera, the veil of performance slips on and off, as the participants break rank, character, time, fact. There are occasional news clips of Hamrouni in attack mode. Ben Hania keeps some of the meta scaffolding in – a debate between Sabri and Eya over whether to curse (it wouldn’t be accurate if they didn’t, argues Eya); the actors explaining how in post-revolution Tunisia, the head scarf went from a symbol of resistance to an instrument of control; a conversation between Hamrouni and Sabri over how much to personally engage in a history of pain. “I have learned to protect myself,” says Sabri. “And what if you can’t?” Hamrouni wonders. “If you can’t get the character out of your head? If they unnerve you, because they seem too real?”

At times, the sisters appear as one happy, chatty family, the kind with whom you could talk about waxing, as Eya and Tayssir do, or play games imagining food that is not there. Hamrouni observes both from the doorframe, recalling the latter as some of her happiest memories. But the re-stagings do unearth a lineage of pain – steeped in misogyny, raised poor and forced into marriage, Hamrouni raised her daughters in fear of their sexuality. Beaten by both parents and constricted, Ghofrane and Rahma turned to fundamentalism as a source of freedom. Both Eya and Tayssir allude to sexual abuse by Hamrouni’s boyfriend in a scene where Eya carries a knife. Unnerved by the revelations, Majd, playing the ex-stepfather, walks out; Eya presses for him to return.

“It was an open discussion,” said Ben Hania of the shoot, which lasted for about four weeks at the same location in Tunisia, occasionally requiring off-camera discussions, restarts and redirections. “I have to react quickly to say OK, let’s not go there,” she said. “It was a very emotional shoot.”

Hamrouni, in particular, emerges as a complex character, fearless in seeking her daughters, utterly outspoken, and yet fear-bound in raising them, alternatively sweet and withering, a woman of deep faith extremely skeptical of fundamentalism. “She had this contradiction where she is the incarnation and the guardian of the temple of the patriarchy, as an idea, as a concept,” said Ben Hania. “And she needed to do this, in a way, to protect herself and her daughters. But the opposite happens.”

Survival tactics, carving out what power one can, the inextricable mark of patriarchy on one’s autonomy – one sees parallels to, say, anti-ERA activists in the US, or women across cultures who fight the things they also embody, or vice versa. “People may think: ‘Ah, they are Muslim,’ or something like this, but when we look close, it’s the manifestation of the same thing in different colors,” said Ben Hania.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there are no definitive answers for why Ghofrane and Rahma left, just “keys”, as Ben Hania puts it. Nor is there a reunion, yet, for the family. Ben Hania and her team, along with Hamrouni, have continued to pressure the Tunisian government to repatriate the sisters and Ghofrane’s now eight-year-old daughter Fatma, who has spent her life in captivity. Ghofrane and Rahma have not seen the film, but received descriptions from their sisters via phone. Hamrouni, Eya and Tayssir remain hopeful for their return, according to the film’s coda. Until then, in Four Daughters, they take what healing they can find.

• Four Daughters is now available to rent digitally in the US and will be out in the UK on 22 March