Alberto Rubio / Juan David Latorre
“This film is about Tunisian women, and you know how important women have been to Tunisia for 68 years now”, said the North African country’s ambassador to Spain, Fatma Omrani, during the preview in Madrid of ‘Four Daughters’ (Les Filles d’Olfa), the documentary by filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania, nominated this year for an Oscar.
Omrani recalled the date of 13 August 1956 when, under the government of the country’s first president, Habib Bourguiba, the right to vote for women was approved and the Personal Status Code was adopted, which abolished polygamy and repudiation, as well as recognising other social rights for Tunisian women.
The film tells the story of a mother and four daughters caught between lack of resources, modernity, traditional customs and religious radicalism. “Four Daughters”, added Fatma Omrani, “who are becoming women and who will each have their own destiny”.
In 2016, Olfa Hamrouni lost two of her four daughters when they joined ISIS in Libya. How to approach this tragedy that is at once intimate, familial and collective? Kaouther Ben Hania hybridises fiction and documentary resources to stage the story of Olfa and her daughters, alongside the real protagonists, and the complicity of three actresses in the roles of the two absent sisters and, at times, the mother. A game of mirrors between reality and its representation that serves as a catalyst for Olfa’s many repressed emotions and in which Ben Hania continues his denunciation of the forms of patriarchal violence in his country without ceasing to reflect on how to tackle them through film.
‘Four Daughters’ is nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the upcoming Oscars, the French César Awards, the Cannes Film Festival, the European Film Awards (EFA) and the Independent Spirit Awards.
The ambassador took the opportunity to recall that Tunisia has always been one of the cinematographic poles of North Africa, since the Lumière brothers projected and shot films there, to the point that the country came to be known as the ‘Hollywood of the southern Mediterranean’ in the 1970s.
Fatma Omrani praised the figure of the director, Kaouther Ben Hania, “a woman of a new generation who has managed to reach the highest international competitions”, and expressed her hope that ‘The Four Daughters’ will be this year’s winning film at the Los Angeles ceremony.
‘Four Daughters’ opens to the public today at the Renoir cinemas in Madrid in the original version with Spanish subtitles. Directed and written by Kaouther Ben Hania, it stars Hend Sabri, Olfa Hamrouni, Eya Chikhaoui, Tayssir Chikhaoui, Nour Karoui, Ichraq Mata and Majd Mastoura.
