Four Daughters

Kaouther Ben Hania / France, Tunisia, Germany, Saudi Arabia / 2023 / Czech Premiere / 107 min.

synopsis

Olfa, a Tunisian cleaning lady, is a mother of four daughters and above all a strong woman with unshakable principles. One day, however, her two older daughters disappear without a trace. To cope with their loss and understand what led to their disappearance, she embarks on a challenging and often painful filmed reconstruction of her and her daughters' life stories with director Kaouther Ben Hania and professional actresses. The work, which straddles the line between fiction and documentary, reflects on issues of human conscience, guilt and violence passed down through generations, as well as sisterly love, female independence and hope.

“[The mother-daughter relationship] is full of love, hate, violence, darkness and light. […] What interested me, as you said, is that it’s a women’s story and also a story of adolescent women. They were teenagers when everything happened. So what does it mean to be a teenager in a context like this? What does it mean to start thinking about sexuality with a mother that does not want to hear about your sexuality or your desire? In a world where desire is punished.”

Source: Variety Magazine

biography

Tunisian director and screenwriter Kaouther Ben Hania studied film at EDAC in Tunis and La Fémis and the Sorbonne in Paris. She is the author of the award-winning feature films Beauty and the Dogs (2017), The Man Who Sold His Skin (2020) and the documentary Zaineb Hates the Snow (2016). For her latest work, Four Daughters, she received the Golden Eye Award for Best Documentary at this year's Cannes Film Festival.

more about film

director:	Kaouther Ben Hania
cast:	Hend Sabri, Olfa Hamrouni, Eya Chikhaoui , Tayssir Chikhaoui , Nour Karoui, Ichraq Matar, Majd Mastoura
producer:	Nadim Cheikhrouha, Habib Attia, Thanassis Karathanos
script:	Kaouther Ben Hania