Four Daughters (M)

One of the year's most acclaimed releases, this riveting documentary by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania uses an audacious formal conceit to tell the story of Olfa Hamrouni and her four daughters. Attempting to answer the question of how and why the Tunisian woman’s two eldest were radicalised, Ben Hania reveals a complex history. We watch as the family relives key events in their lives with help from professional actors standing in for the missing girls.​

Winner of the Best Documentary award at the Cannes Film Festival, Best Documentary Feature at the Gotham Awards, and Best Writing at the IDA Documentary Awards, Four Daughters is a compelling portrait of five women and a unique and ambitious work of nonfiction cinema that pushes against the conventional boundaries of the documentary form to explore the nature of memory, rebellion, and the ties that bind mothers and daughters.

Cast: Tayssir Chikhaoui, Olfa Hamrouni, Nour KarouiIchraq Matar, Majd Mastoura, Hend Sabri, Eya Chikahoui

Director: Kaouther Ben Hania

★★★★★ "[Kaouther Ben Hania's] technique could have made for purely formal game-playing: instead, the artifice casts a sharp magnifying gaze on real family agony and, against the odds, occasional joy." FINANCIAL TIMES

★★★★ "The exposure of the film’s underlying structures...invites audiences to think about the processes of storytelling and interpretation, which is important, because it’s a story which took the missing women away." EYE FOR FILM

★★★★ "Like a kind of cinematic Lego set, Ben Hania takes the building blocks of filmmaking and constructs from them something cathartic, affecting and original." TIME OUT

★★★★ "emotionally wrenching" GUARDIAN