Kaouther Ben Hania on the Ethics of Making Oscar-Nominated Documentary 'Four Daughters'

Kaouther Ben Hania is no stranger to awards season. The Tunisian writer and director had her 2017 feature, the social drama Beauty and the Dogs selected to represent her country in the Best International Feature category at the Oscars but did make the nomination list. Her next feature, The Man Who Sold His Skin, made the nomination list in 2021.

Ben Hania may be known for her fiction work, but her background is in documentary, and with her latest FourDaughters, she returns to the form of her early career work. FourDaughters shared the L'Oeil d'or — the documentary prize at the Cannes Film Festival — with Morocco's The Mother of All Lies, when it debuted in May last year and is now one of two African films nominated in the Best Documentary Feature category at the Oscars.

But that doesn’t make the film any easier to categorize. Ben Hania uses a blend of documentary and fiction formats to tell the compelling true story of a Tunisian family, consisting of matriarch Olfa Hamrouni and her four daughters. The family bond is shattered perhaps irrevocably when the two elder daughters, Ghofrane and Rahma Chikhaoui, leave home to join the Islamic State in Libya.

OkayAfrica speaks to Ben Hania, who is now the first Arab woman to hold two Oscar nominations, about her return to documentary, the bold choices she makes in FourDaughters, as well as ethical considerations.

This interview below has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

OkayAfrica: This story is familiar to some and new to many others. How did you arrive at this particular structure for your storytelling?

Kaouther Ben Hania: It took me a long time to figure out how to tell this story and the best way to tell it. I started this project in 2016, hoping to do a more classical documentary but it wasn’t good enough. I was not satisfied with what I filmed so I put it aside and started work on another movie, The Man Who Sold His Skin. When I finished that, I came back to this project. I asked myself why I wanted to do this movie because the answer would help me figure out how I should go about it.

For me, the answer was to understand why those girls went through that path. I quickly figured out that to understand why, I had to dig deeper into their past. Now for documentary, filming the past where there were no images is a challenge. But there is this huge cliché called the reenactment. I told myself I would take this cliché and hijack it, essentially use it as I want. So, I came up with this device where I am bringing in actors who will be directed by the real characters to bring the past to life, not only to reenact for the sake of it. I wanted them to question the past, understand it and embark on a retrospective journey together.

Many filmmakers run away from the reenactment trope because of the baggage that is often associated with it. You took ownership and then molded it in service of your own vision. That is bold.

Alfred Hitchcock once said it is better to start with a cliché than to end up with one. I chose to embrace the cliché, deconstruct it and use it for the purpose of the movie.

The film is a deconstruction on so many levels. You are breaking down the story, the family structure, the filmmaking process, even…

I thought that it should be a movie where we break the fourth wall from the get-go. I am sharing with the audience the fact that I am doing a movie, and that we have actors working alongside the film’s subjects. So, from the beginning, there is a meta-structure to it that I wanted to explore because I think that nowadays everybody is familiar with the fabrication of images. It is no longer a secret the way that it was, say at the beginning of the twentieth century. So, telling people upfront that we are doing a movie is not something that will change their perception of it. In a way, we are being more honest with them. I also wanted to use this to tell the story in a better way.

How did you make the decisions on what characters require actors, as well as when to bring the actors in?

The two absent girls were a no-brainer, so we had to use actresses to fill their presence. The mother, Olfa, is a larger-than-life character. I could not let her be by herself for this movie because I needed her to understand what she did and how things happened. And to achieve this, bringing her double or a mirror was important on another level. The main idea was to split Olfa in two so she can reflect better and more deeply. Also, it was to show her complexity.

Hend Sabry (Kira and the Jinn, The Treasure 2) is great for this because she is on the opposite spectrum of Olfa. Where Olfa is very emotional, Hend is very rational, so these polar opposites make the exploration of Olfa’s character very effective. For me Hend was a kind of surrogate to deliver to us the full complexity and also to show Olfa her own contradictions.

Did you have it all outlined? Were you doing storyboards or was it all in the editing?

At every step of any production, you have to make a lot of decisions and this film was no different. Sometimes you make a decision while shooting and find out much later in the process that it wasn’t the right one to serve the film. I won’t call what I had an outline. I had an idea, and the arc was to try to understand the disappearance of the two girls before revealing where they went so this was the basic structure.

But I was mostly finding the movie in the editing process. The shooting was like any other documentary. Every day we film a memory and then the scene can develop in any direction, so the editing was to make all those complexities, layers, stories, and anecdotes coherent and understandable in one movie. The editing was a very long process because I shot a lot of material; in fact the first rough cut was about five hours. From there, my main objective was to make the most effective, emotional and well-told movie with all the material I had, and to the best of my ability.

There are ethical issues arising from reenactments like this; having people reprocess their trauma for the camera’s observation. How were you working through these concerns?

Yes, this was the main question that I was asking myself all the time. But before even starting the shoot - because we shot in 2021 and I had been working on this since 2016 - I made sure Olfa and her daughters were in active therapy so we could solve many issues ahead and once they arise. The idea behind the shoot was to provide a safe space for them, and for the actors also so we could trust each other and be vulnerable without fear of judgment.

As you say, the movie isn’t easy. It was a real minefield of emotions, but my compass was the real characters — Olfa and her daughters. They were the ones to tell me no or yes, depending on what they were comfortable with. I was in control artistically, but it was always an open discussion between me and them. It was a long journey of doubt and questioning but this is normal, otherwise it gets boring and uninteresting.