Four Daughters
Directed by Kaouther Ben Hania
Starring Hend Sabri, Ichraq Matar and Nour Karoui
Classification N/A; 107 minutes
Opens at Toronto’s TIFF Lightbox and Vancouver’s Vancity theatres Jan. 26, expanding to other Canadian cities throughout February
Critic’s Pick
Nominated for best documentary at this year’s Academy Awards, the new Arabic-language film Four Daughters might be the knottiest of this year’s shortlisted docs, simply for the reason that it is not, strictly speaking, a documentary. Deliberately bending the definition and rules of non-fiction cinema, director Kaouther Ben Hania’s feature is a thoroughly bold, frequently brave and occasionally quite funny experiment that threatens, but never manages, to go completely off the rails.
Hania’s layered set-up is broken down in the film’s opening minutes. In Tunisia, Olfa Hamrouni is caught halfway between hope and grief after her two eldest daughters, Ghofrane and Rahma, disappear in 2015. While her two youngest children, Eya and Tayssir, remain at home, the family is shattered. In a bid to piece the clan back together, or to perhaps to achieve a more ambiguous artistic goal, Hania hires actors Ichraq Matar and Nour Karoui to play the missing siblings, stepping into Olfa’s life while the cameras roll.
But to add a further schism to this constructed reality, Hania brings in noted Tunisian-Egyptian actor Hend Sabri (once voted one of the “100 most powerful Arab women” by Egyptian media) to play Olfa for moments that become “too traumatic” for the mother herself to revisit.
The resulting film could, crassly, be called Arab cinema’s answer to Todd Haynes’s May December – a meta-fictional drama that finds its tension and surprise in stepping back and forth over the line separating the authentic and the rehearsed. Yet Hania doesn’t have the kind of mean streak in her that such an experiment might require, with the director gracefully favouring understanding over manipulation.
As unflinching as it is empathetic, Four Daughters is the best and slipperiest kind of film, whether you want to label it a documentary or not.