Ben Hania’s new work is a documentary of performative reenactments as actors and real-life subjects break the borders of reality in a bid to confront traumatic memories of a family permanently altered by religious radicalisation. 

---

---

In Kaouther Ben Hania’s latest film, Four Daughters, which won the Golden Eye for Best Documentary at Cannes, she breaks the borders of reality as both her real-life subjects and actors mingle and dovetail in their performative roles as reenactors of traumatic memories. 

A mother and her two younger daughters must square up to the past, while actresses acting as stand-ins for the mother (when scenes get too emotionally raw) and her two missing older daughters create an uncanny sense of verisimilitude. 

The meta-documentary showcases the power of art to not just transform and enable human beings to assert control over what they cannot change, but also to allow them to reflect on what has cast a perpetual dark shadow in their souls. 

“It’s going to reopen the wounds.”

As such, Four Daughters, as a collective endeavour with the conspicuous presence of the filmmaker, becomes a courageous confrontation of how religious radicalisation has permanently altered the dynamics of a family. 

We are in Tunisia, and Olfa, the mother, has the thankless task of taking everyone down not memory lane but a dark alleyway. 

Though I wasn’t as particularly enamoured by the film’s unconventional form as others, Four Daughters does ask us to think about how cinema could act as a cathartic tool, in this case, more so for the people involved in the film than the audience. 

I felt a bit distanced from its pursuit of truth and closure, dramatized or otherwise, but I recognise its commitment to pathos.  Ben Hania’s work highlights that religious radicalisation may only be beginning to reveal its personal toll, even more than 20 years after 9/11.

Grade: B+

---

Trailer:

Music: