Screening times:
Friday, February 16, 6:30 PM - SOLD OUT
Friday, February 16, 8:50 PM - Half-capacity screening
Saturday, February 17, 6:30 PM - SOLD OUT
Saturday, February 17, 8:50 PM - Half-capacity screening
Kaouther Ben Hania | Documentary | France, Tunisia, Germany, Saudi Arabia | 2023 | 107m | Arabic and French with English subtitles
with Olfa Hamrouni, Eya Chikahoui, Ichraq Matar as Ghorfrane Chikhaoui, Nour Karoui as Rahma Chikhaoui, Tayssir Chikhaoui
One of the year's most acclaimed releases, this riveting 2024 Oscar-nominated documentary by filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania (The Man Who Sold His Skin) 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 radicalized, Ben Hania reveals a complex and tragic history. We watch as the family shares and relives key events in their lives with help from professional actors standing in for the missing girls. Tunisian star Hind Sabri stands in as Olfa in difficult scenes where the matriarch wasn’t prepared to play herself.
The family is remarkably open about how this artifice compares to their memories of real life, discussing it together and with the actors who serve as doppelgängers of their missing sisters and daughters. Reenactments of traumatic personal history butt up against difficult recollections, and the casual way the film shifts between fictionalized scenes and emotional testimony around childhood memories makes for original, surprising, and potent storytelling.
“I’ve noticed in life we often behave in a way that is influenced by cliches that we’ve seen on TV or in the media,” says director Kaouther Ben Hania. “Olfa had been conditioned by journalists. She played with great tragedian talent the role of the grieving, hysterical, guilt-ridden mother. Most of these reports don’t allow for the different of an individual to be explored. Yet Olfa is so exuberant, so ambiguous, and so complex it’s impossible to show just one side of her. However, taking a deeper look at the contradictions, the sensations, the emotions, requires time that journalists do not have. It is the role of cinema to explore these areas, these ambiguities of the human spirit. So I began to contemplate this film as a therapeutic laboratory in which memories would be recaptured.”
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.
"In telling the story of Olfa and her daughters, Ben Hania is also telling the tumultuous story of Tunisia in the wake of the Arab Spring, a promising movement that began in that country before spreading to the rest of North Africa and the Middle East." -Bilge Ebiri, New York Magazine/Vulture
"Formally daring, emotionally gripping…a heartbreaker about mothers and daughters, the cruelty of repression and the slippery but revealing nature of performance." -Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times
Best Documentary - Cannes Film Festival
Best Documentary Feature - Gotham Awards
Best Writing - IDA Documentary Awards
Tickets $8.75 ($8 cash at the door if available).
SOLD OUT
SOLD OUT
Half capacity
Half capacity
