Kaouther Ben Hania on Portraying an Arab Mother Contending With Radicalization and Sexual Desires of Her Teenage Daughters in ‘Four Daughters’

Nick Vivarelli
·5 min read
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Oscar-nominated Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania (“Beauty and the Dogs,” “The Man Who Sold His Skin”) is back in Cannes with “Four Daughters” a powerful drama that mixes documentary and fiction to delve into the story of Tunisia’s Olfa Hamrouni who rose to international prominence in April 2016 when she publicized the radicalization of her two teenage daughters who had left Tunisia to fight with ISIS.

The film, which is the only Arab entry in competition, stars Egyptian-Tunisian star Hend Sabri in the lead role of an actor who must play Hamrouni and gets coaching from the real Olfa on how to prepare for the role. Ben Hania spoke to Variety about the bold choice she made.

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What drew you to want to dig deep into Olfa’s story?

So it was in 2016, and there was media interest around this story and a lot of similar stories. And I heard the mother giving an interview on the radio. The way she was talking, it was fascinating for me. I told myself she could really be a movie character because she was so full of flaws and contradictions. I thought all these elements could make a great story. And the story of her daughter was like a mystery for all of us. So I think my first desire was to understand why.

Then of course there’s the very particular hybrid documentary and fiction narrative form you chose

Yes, so I started the shooting in 2016. I shot fly-on-the-wall documentary style, with the mother and the two youngest daughters at their home. But it wasn’t great because what was more interesting for me was what had already happened in the past. So I stopped everything and I told myself: “Let’s put this story aside until I find an interesting way to tell it.” Then, during the pandemic, I watched what I had filmed again. And I was thinking that I needed Olfa’s memories, you know. And memories in cinema are something that’s very complicated. If you have a talking head talking about what happened and why, it’s not interesting. So I told myself: “What about making something about preparing a movie that will never be shot?” I thought about bringing in an actor, so the real character Olfa and her youngest daughter can direct them like one directs an actor, you know?

Tell me more about the process

So I told myself it’ll be the real characters directing an actor telling them about their memory. But also the actor asking her the why and the how. So I came up with this idea. like in Brechtian theater. So, little by little, I came up with a screenplay. I wrote the key scene of their life, which they had already told me during the first shooting. And I made it open, so they could evolve in every scene. And we stayed in this one set, it’s an old abandoned hotel in Tunis. It was like therapy: a kind of introspection about memories. Yeah, this was mainly the process.

How did you get Hend Sabry on board? She’s a big star and this project is probably going to be quite controversial in the Arab world.

Yeah. I contacted her and I told her about the story. And what is great with an actress like Hend Sabry is that she trusted me, which is amazing. Because in the movie she’s playing herself. She is also the actress Hend Sabry. She accepted the risk of not having a detailed screenplay and of me changing everything because it’s a work of love. There was a lot of improvisation. So it was great. And I think that she felt, in a way, that it’s something that she had never done in her career, you know?

I think this film breaks new ground in terms the insight that it gives you into the inner world of Arab women. Do you agree?

Well it’s something that is common to all human beings, since we all have mothers. It’s this idea of having children and transmitting what’s been received from mother to daughter, which can be full of trauma, and how this can affect and push the new generation to commit some absurdity or some craziness. So this was very interesting for me, the mother-daughter relationship.

It’s a relationship that many people idealize, but is not always so idyllic

No, it’s not. It’s full of love, hate, violence, darkness and light. And in the relationship between Olfa and her daughters I had the full spectrum of those emotions. I mean, what interested me, as you said, is that it’s a women’s story and also a story of adolescent women. They are teenagers when everything happened. So what does it mean to be a teenager in a context like this? What does it mean to start thinking about sexuality with a mother that does not want to hear about your sexuality or your desire? In a world where desire is punished. Yeah, I don’t know if this can put all this in context. But there are so many things I found in them that I recognized in myself. And I told myself that if I had these emotions, when I heard them, when I filmed them, when I saw them talking, then I could convey them to a large audience.

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