Four Daughters, the searing documentary from the twice-Oscar-nominated Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania, is guaranteed to make you weep—but what makes this inventive, heart-rending drama even more remarkable is that it’s also simultaneously one of the most joyous and life-affirming releases of the last year.
It centers on Olfa, a warm, funny, world-weary mother of four, whose life has been upended by tragedy—years earlier, we learn, her two eldest daughters, Rahma and Ghofrane, were radicalized, and left their family behind in Tunisia to join the Islamic State in Libya. She, along with her two youngest, Eya and Tayssir, are bereft and unable to process this unimaginable loss.
From this point onwards, you might think that you can guess what comes next: a series of talking heads—from the family to government officials, reporters and other eyewitnesses—piecing together the story of the two older sisters and setting it in the political context of the Arab Spring and everything that followed. However, the director, ingeniously, swerves this more conventional approach. Instead, she casts two actors, Nour Karoui and Ichraq Matar, to play the absent sisters, and another, Hend Sabry, to embody their mother in scenes that are too painful for the real Olfa to recreate herself.
The effect is both thrilling and unsettling, and results in something wonderfully and achingly original: Olfa speaks to us while we see Sabry getting into character and adopting her voice; and when the mother and daughters meet the two young women who’ll take the place of Rahma and Ghofrane, they’re both elated and heartbroken. As they teach them about the missing girls they’ll be playing—their passions, their humor, their ever-changing tastes in fashion—they grow close and, eventually, become a kind of makeshift family. We see Eya and Tayssir’s faces light up, and their reverence for their sisters be transplanted onto their new friends–but we also know that a real reunion will likely never occur.