108 min | NR | October 27, 2023 | Kino Lorber
A Tunisian mother loses two of her daughters to Islamist radicalization. Kaouther Ben Hania hires actresses to play the missing girls and to stand in for the mother when the memories cut too deep. The reenactment is the autopsy.
Olfa Hamrouni is a Tunisian mother of four daughters. Two of them disappear into Islamist radicalization and leave the country to join the cause. Kaouther Ben Hania builds a documentary around that absence by hiring professional actresses to play the two missing girls and to stand in for the mother in scenes too painful for Olfa to perform. The two remaining daughters play themselves. The film is not about terrorism. It is about how patriarchy, abuse, and inherited violence travel down through generations of women until the daughters repeat the mother.
Hend Sabri plays Olfa in the scenes the real Olfa cannot face. She inhabits the contradictions of a woman who beats her children and shields them in the same breath. Olfa Hamrouni plays herself with a rawness no actress could fake. She is funny, cruel, self-justifying, and devastated, often within the same sentence. Nour Karoui and Ichraq Matar play the vanished daughters Rahma and Ghofrane. They watch the surviving sisters Eya and Tayssir reenact childhood scenes, and the line between performer and subject dissolves.
Kaouther Ben Hania directs and writes the film as a structured experiment that keeps exposing its own machinery. She films the actresses meeting the real women, rehearsing the scenes, and breaking down between takes. The camera stays on the family during the reenactments and catches the moment a staged memory turns into a real one. Majd Mastoura plays every man in the story, a single actor cast as an interchangeable patriarchy. The production design strips the set to a soundstage and refuses to pretend we are anywhere but inside a reconstruction.
Four Daughters works because it never lets the audience forget that it is watching a performance of grief. The artifice does not soften the pain. It sharpens it. Ben Hania uses the documentary form to interrogate memory itself and to ask whether reenacting a wound can heal it or only reopen it. The film refuses the comfort of an answer and trusts the silence the question leaves behind.