Four Daughters: A Complex, Hybridized Doc About Growing Up Between Haram and a Hard Place

By Liz Braun

Rated: B+

Tunisian mother of four Olfa Hamrouni was all over the news in 2015 when her two eldest daughters ran away to join ISIS.

Ghofrane and Rahma were 16 and 15 when they vanished from their mother’s home.

The Oscar-nominated Four Daughters is a documentary about Olfa and her children; the film is an extraordinary mix of reality and re-enactment from filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania.

Olfa and her younger daughters Eya and Tayssir appear in the doc as themselves, while the missing sisters are played by actors: Ichrak Matar plays Ghofrane, and Rahma is played by Nour Karoui. 

Four Daughters: Eya Chikahoui playing herself, Nour Karoui playing Rahma Chikhaoui, Ichraq Matar playing Ghorfrane Chikhaoui, Tayssir Chikhaoui playing herself.

As well, the actress Hend Sabri takes over and plays Olfa in any scene too emotional for Olfa herself to handle. Three worthless men in Olfa’s life are all played by the same actor, Majd Mastoura; extrapolate at will. 

It’s an audacious bit of filmmaking.

Within the first seven minutes of Four Daughters, Olfa is in tears — she meets the two actresses who will play her daughters. 

Then, when each actress dons a niqab, it’s the younger sisters’ turn to cry as they remember the changes in their missing sisters’ lives.

The story is told initially by Olfa, who offers a summary of her own upbringing as the tough one in a family of all daughters, no sons, raised by a single mother.  It fell to Olfa from adolescence onward to defend her mother and sisters against abusive men; she married an abusive lout herself, here leaving it to Hend Sabri and Majd Mastoura to act out the horrors of her wedding night.

As the story progresses, it turns out that Olfa gives as good as she gets — her daughters are all afraid of their father but just as afraid of their mother, as Olfa is quick with a beating or a harsh word for her girls. 

Four Daughters is an odd mix of domestic detail, family affection, sisterly carry-on and offhand violence, with an unholy history of physical and psychological abuse dogging all the women under Olfa’s roof. Then there’s the wider abuse and control available via the patriarchal society in which they live; based on her thoughts about sex, shame and obedience, Olfa seems to have absorbed a lot of misogynistic received wisdom about the world.

Why Ghofrane and Rahma ever decided to leave home is complicated. After the fall of Ben Ali there was a rise in Islamic influence in Tunisia; the younger girls explain that their sisters weren’t alone in adopting the niqab, as other women in the neighbourhood did the same. One says that wearing hijab then was a form of rebellion, a way of opposing the established order.

Olfa blames the government for allowing imams to preach in the street, “And indoctrinate my daughters.”

Maybe it was political/religious; maybe it was the beatings the older girls got after Olfa found out they had experimented with goth life and boyfriends; maybe it was intergenerational trauma, or what Olfa calls a curse on her bloodline.

Four Daughters is a strange, moving, weirdly stagey film, heartbreaking in most aspects but infuriating in others. The mystery here is how it became Tunisia’s entry in the 2024 Oscars, given the underlying suggestion that women there generally face one form of prison or another.

Four Daughters. Written and directed by Kaouther Ben Hania, with Olfa Hamrouni, Eya Chikhaoui, Tayssir Chikhaoui, Hend Sabri. The movie opens in theatres in Toronto and Vancouver on January 26, and in other Canadian cities in early February.