The Powers of Recreation in Ben Hania’s FOUR DAUGHTERS
Film
Film by Kaouther Ben Hania
Analysis written by Marianna Kaimakliotis
Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania’s documentary drama Four Daughters breaks the conventional form of documentary storytelling to explore themes of agency, abuse, family systems, and the influence of others in the development of self. The story follows Olfa, a mother of four daughters, who has lost her two eldest girls, Ghofrane and Rahma, to Islamic fundamentalism groups. Her family gained media attention after Olfa began speaking out about her situation, expressing her fear that her two remaining daughters, Eya and Tayssir, would be taken by radicalists, and that she would lose them too.
Ben Hania, in the place of archival footage that doesn’t exist, recreates scenes from the women’s past using both actors, and, playing themselves, Olfa, Eya, and Tayssir. Actresses are brought in to play Ghofrane and Rahma, and in moments where Olfa feels too emotional, an actress is brought in to play her as well. There is also one male actor who represents their father, their mother’s boyfriend, and a government official.
Ben Hania takes the stories of the women, the recreations, and the moments of candid action, and weaves them together to help us understand the kind of life these women led, and seems to try to answer the question of what would cause these two sisters to abandon their home and join a terrorist organization. What could lead to this? How does this family cope? As the film progresses, we begin to see how systems of abuse, social customs, and ideas of agency through religious piety all get weaved together, and it is through Ben Hania’s direction, through circumstance and context, we can understand possibly, what they may have been feeling, what may have motivated them to do what they have done. As the film takes place, Ghofrane and Rahma are in custody, prisoners of the state.
Mom, Olfa, is introduced first. She recalls her upbringing, forced to be strong and brave as one of many daughters, raised alone by her mother. Her family experienced threats of violence often, and Olfa took it upon herself to defend her mother, her sisters. She used her body as a weapon, using weights to get strong, cutting her hair to appear masculine, she became the man of the house. When she gives birth to daughters, she speaks of it as a curse, their bodies a shameful situation, something that she must control. As the daughters grow into their bodies, they are susceptible to abuse by their father, and, once their mother moves them to her sisters, by her mother’s new boyfriend. In an effort to protect her daughters, as Olfa claims, she brings abuse into their lives, something she recounts at the end of the film as something her mother did to her, a curse she can’t seem to shake.
As the film takes place, we see Olfa often unable to take responsibility for her own effect on the girls, claiming often that the way she treats them is simply a reflection of how things are. We can understand where she comes from, the experiences that have created a hardness in her, a strict, black and white approach to raising her daughters, one based in survival, one that works fluid only when there is no push-back, this is an approach that can never succeed, it requires each daughter to be nothing but an agreeable, pleasing, extension of her. As soon as she feels she has lost control, understanding, she is unafraid to act in superiority, shut off emotionally from her children’s wishes. When her boyfriend, an escaped convict, who exposes the daughters to his drug abuse, is arrested again, Olfa blames the daughters. The daughters, in turn, struggle to come to terms with the physical and sexual abuse he put upon them, and the times they didn’t speak up because they knew how in love their mother was. When Olfa recalls hitting the children, speaking ill towards them, she struggles to make eye contact and acts child-like, defensive. She blames the revolution for taking her daughters away.
Eya and Tayssir speak of their situation with grace, Eya more outspoken than Tayssir. Eya is able to recall in jest all the awful things her mother has said to her, singing a song with a line “I hope to see on the news that you have died.” Her mother laughs with her. When speaking about their mother’s boyfriend, Tayssir begins to cry, saying despite the abuse he put the family through, he is like a father to her, and she cannot help but still care for him deeply. We see how pain is dealt with in the family by being swept under the rug, how everyone is expected not to dwell. The girls recall the vicious manner in which their mother would beat them, with her hands and with objects, often in a manner that they claim brought their mother joy.
Ghofrane and Rahma receive the worst of the abuse, as the eldest daughters, and as they grow and begin teenage rebellion, they also begin to become indoctrinated by the rising fundamentalism in Tunisia. It seemed that their lack of agency over their body, both in the home and by the state, took a great psychological toll on the girls. Ghofrane received a beating so great from her mother after dying her hair and waxing her legs, that Ghofrane was unconscious. Her turn to the hijab later seems a form of control. The promise of salvation, of honor, seemed to be a way the daughters could bring back some agency. Eya and Tayssir reflect on the “fashionable” manner the hijab was worn, and the girls discuss how the scarf was once a symbol of rebellion in a culture that made a headscarf illegal, but after the revolution it became a tool for control and submission. The family recalls Rahma scolding her mother for being impure, for not wearing a headscarf. Rahma would beat the two daughters when they “sinned”, and self-flagellate when she herself acted in “sin.” Violence and suffering seemed to be embedded in the women, and as often occurs, they escaped one abusive, controlling dynamic for another, in a search for freedom.
By recreating these stories, by giving these women a voice, the catharsis offered seems to offer not just a personal vindication, a proof of injustice, of endurance, but also takes a moment that was private, isolating, and makes it public, allowing for safety and reassurance. The two girls seem eager to speak about what was never suitable to discuss, they find courage to confront their mother in front of the camera, to speak about the ways the state makes them feel they don’t have control over their bodies as women, and they can grow close. Eya and Tayssir sit with the actresses playing their sisters and they bond, playing with each other’s hair, discussing their experiences in puberty, playing games. In moments where the actors seem less eager to perform the story as the girls recall it, they speak up in insistence, saying, when the actress playing Olfa doesn’t want to swear, that that is the truth of the situation, that this is to recreate reality, to work through, to show truth, to help people understand.
Despite Ghofrane and Rahma’s absence, their actors and family’s accounts seem to bring them to the screen as though they were really there. When Ghofrane is seen later, begging in government footage to hold her daughter, it is hard to separate her from the actress we have followed, and to not feel sympathy and understanding, despite the context of why she was arrested. You feel as though you know her.
Ben Hania’s refusal to sugarcoat the violence that has dressed the lives of Olfa and her daughters shows the brutal way that accepting things as they are eventually leads to a tipping point. A family raised in abuse, under control, is susceptible to many other violences, and hopefully in recreation, in speaking up, change can occur, and cycles can be ended.