As ‘Four Daughters’ finally opens in the U.S., I sat down with the film’s director at the London Film Festival for a dose of typically straight to the point insight into her work and the film’s necessity, in our current media landscape that likes to categorize people as just good or evil, when life is really mostly lived in shades of grey.
When I first watched Kaouther Ben Hania’s Four Daughters at the film’s world premiere gala in Cannes, I knew the film would go on to win awards and be hailed in the international media. What I didn’t expect was how deeply the story would burrow into my thoughts, coming up time and again in flashes of images (the last image of the film is burned in my heart, and I’m sure I’m not alone) and philosophical readjustments.
This weekend, the film, a hybrid documentary which employs the help of actors along with the story’s real life subjects to tell its tale of what ISIS really stands for — a hint, it’s about rebelling against irrational rules that life imposes on the young — opens in the U.S.. And not a moment too soon in my opinion.
While Four Daughters doesn’t profess to offer the answers to all of the world’s evils, it does provide a roadmap into the reasons why conflicts arise and people so easily take sides within them. Even while knowing all that is being said and done isn’t good.
When I sat down with Ben Hania in London, she talked about being the Tunisian submission to the Best International Feature Film Oscar race “we should make a campaign to urge the voters to watch my movie,” to which I added, “I can’t believe they wouldn’t already be convinced.”
Ben Hania pointed out that most people who watched The Man Who Sold His Skin — her previous feature which was nominated at the 93rd Academy Awards in 2021 — would not make the connection that Four Daughters is by the same filmmaker. And that did segue perfectly into a question I asked her about the talent she possesses switching from fiction to this kind of hybrid documentary genre, in which she’s so very comfortable.
To that, she answered that it’s because she learned filmmaking “in documentary and I applied what I learned to fiction,” and makes docs to experiment, and the experimentation space in fiction isn’t that big, mostly due to the gigantic budget needed today to make a film.
When I prodded her whether Four Daughters could ever be accused of being exploitive, towards Olfa and her daughters, she quickly and graciously put me in my place, by pointing out that until her film, Olfa’s story had been told in the news, only she and her four daughters were dismissed as just typical Arab women or worse, accused of being villains.
If you feel like you need one film to help you decode the woman’s world in the MENA region, I would say that once again, that film is provided by Kaouther Ben Hania and her award worthy Four Daughters. The film premieres this weekend in the US — in NYC at the IFC Center, with a Q&A with Ben Hania on Friday the 27th, before moving to Los Angeles from November 2nd at the Laemmle Royal, with Ben Hania in attendance on the 2nd and 3rd.
Watch my Selfies Interview above with Kaouther Ben Hania for more insight.
Top photo courtesy of the BFI London Film Festival, used with permission.