For as long as I've been watching her work, the filmmaker has been reinventing cinema, her cinema, which knows no boundaries and sees no limits.
I remember exactly how and where I met Academy Award nominated filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania. And how she made me feel. Because beyond the niceties and conversations we hold with people, especially in the hyper microcosm of film festivals, it's a feeling first of all that we carry inside which reminds us of them. In the film business, it is more often than not that the people you meet will make you feel bad, unintelligent, unappreciated. Ben Hania though is a different breed and I'll always remember the way she looked at me intensely yet with a spark of approval in her eyes.
This was in Cannes in 2013, when her then groundbreakingly inventive hybrid documentary Challat of Tunis screened in l'ACID sidebar. L'ACID is a French film directors association that helps films find an audience, but also distribution and more screening options. It rained a lot that year and the morning I met her inside the UAE pavilion it was also raining and dark outside. But our conversation, which included Mohamed Habib Attia, the co-producer on all of Ben Hania's work (along with maverick Tunisian producer Nadim Cheikhrouha), was so deep and meaningful, I remember some of her words exactly, particularly when she talked about the difference between the news and documentaries -- their power. I went back to find the exact quote, from my HuffPost feature, where Ben Hania stated that "the main difference between news and cinema is like the difference between amnesia and memory -- cinema is memory it's for generations, but news is now."
Follow that thread of admiration throughout her other work, the wronged heroine of her 2017 film Beauty and the Dogs, which should be required viewing for any woman going out into the world today and the 2020 Oscar-nominated The Man Who Sold His Skin, which premiered in Venice -- a first for Ben Hania who is a Cannes darling and was even Jury President last year's for their Critics Week sidebar. Time and time again, Ben Hania made me feel included, not excluded, both in the way she made her films -- offering contrasting, never commonplace opinions on the human experience -- and perhaps, most importantly, from a very personal standpoint. She even quoted my words on her poster for the cinematic release of Beauty and the Dogs, and unlike most other filmmakers out there, added my name to the quote and spelled it right!
Fast forward to her latest film, Four Daughters and once again, I felt included by Ben Hania and her producer Cheikhrouha, who personally found me a seat to watch the film inside the Lumiere, at the official world premiere screening. Because this year the Festival de Cannes was a logistical nightmare for this journalist, a run against time with the absurd bureaucracy of a French institution which claims to celebrate cinema but hates anyone enthusiastic about the Seventh Art. Yes, if you're a nasty, judgmental male critic with a chip on your shoulder, come this way. Here are your fabulous credentials, complete with a yellow pastille and all. No, you are a little woman, with a lot of readers and great insight into the cinema that could make us understand "the Other". Get back! Cannes is not for you, petite femme.
Anyway, I digress. Apparently, and this was said by Ben Hania at her premiere, Cannes' general delegate Thierry Fremaux picked Four Daughters as the first film chosen to be in this year’s Competition. And I applaud him for that. I can see the appeal of featuring a film that delves deep into what happens to those who are left behind by the choices of those who join ISIS — Daesh, ISIL, whatever you wish to call it. It is after all the modern equivalent of the Big Bad Wolf and fits a perfect narrative of the western world looking down with disdain on the Arab world.
But leave it to Ben Hania to find a different way of telling this “I think I’ve heard it all before” tale. She hired one of the most beloved actresses in the Arab world, Hend Sabri, along with two young thespians — Nour Karoui and Ichraq Matar — who play the lost daughters of Olfa, the lone matriarch of four young girls in chaotic modern day Tunisia. There is also Berlinale Silver Bear winner Majd Mastoura featured in the film, and he’ll be once again featured in a film at a festival when Mohamed Ben Attia’s Behind the Mountains screens in Venice in early September.
Olfa Hamrouni rose to international prominence in April 2016 when she publicized the radicalization of her two teenage daughters, Rahma and Ghofrane Chikhaoui. The teenagers ran away to Libya to join Daesh and were then arrested by authorities there. Olfa now has a granddaughter as well, one she has never met, a young child whose entire existence has been led inside prison walls. Part bereaved mother, part feminist icon, part Arab world everywoman, Olfa is further made legendary by Ben Hania through the help of the Tunisian-Egyptian Sabri, who is meant to play her in the most traumatic moments of the film. This results in a film that makes you wonder how it could all be, how did we get to this point in society, and how can we possibly recover from the tragedy that seems to envelope the whole of the MENA world these days. ISIL may be “gone” but the ghosts of the other manipulations by the Western world remain — see current day Lebanon, Libya, Iraq… The list goes on and on.
While it would be easy to turn Four Daughters into a tale about the perils of radicalization and how women are victims to the forces of this male dominated "line of work” — for lack of a better definition by this lazy writer — Ben Hania instead turns the film into another super heroine story. This time around, the wonder women are six, well seven if you count the filmmaker among them. Actually, nine if you also count the daughters in jail in Libya. The seven who are free are featured in the header photo above, on the Cannes red carpet flanked by their super hero men, the producer Nadim Cheikhrouha and the film’s sole male star Majd Mastoura. And they show us the power of women when we collaborate with each other, give each other a shoulder to cry on and fight the good fight, together, as a global clan. Yes, Barbie gives us insight into how great the world would be if we could all agree to support one another, but Ben Hania provides an actual roadmap.
After all was said and done, Four Daughters won L'Oeil d'Or Award for best documentary in Cannes, shared with The Mother of All Lies from Morocco, as well as the Positive Cinema Award, and an honorable mention by the François Chalais Prize. It then followed that with a top prize win for best international film at the 2023 Munich International Film Festival.
So what’s next for Kaouther Ben Hania? Right before the North American premiere of Four Daughters in Toronto, she’ll be on the Orizzonti Jury at this year’s 80th Venice International Film Festival, and we hear she is working on her next masterpiece. One I just cannot wait to watch!
Top image courtesy of the Cannes Film Festival, used with permission.