Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania directed several award-winning shorts before her first feature, The Challet of Tunis, opened the ACID section at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival. She followed that with Zaineb Hates the Snow, a documentary filmed over six years. Her next feature, Beauty and the Dogs, was selected for the Un Certain Regard section at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival where it won the Best Sound Creation Award.
In 2020, her film The Man Who Sold His Skin was nominated for an Academy Award in the Best International Feature Film Category.
Her latest film, Four Daughters, is Tunisia’s submission for the 2023 International Feature Oscar and was recently nominated for Best Feature Documentary at the Gotham awards. This docu-fiction hybrid examines the complex relationship between mothers, daughters and sisters. The film sets about to reconstruct the history of Olfa Hamrouni and her four daughters, a story quite well-known in Tunisia, where Olfa’s two eldest daughters were ultimately radicalized and imprisoned for terrorist activities. Ben Hania decided to make the bold move of casting the two women with professional actors and also casting the role of Olfa with an acclaimed Egyptian-Tunisian actress, Hend Sabri, who steps in for Olfa at deliberately selected places in the storytelling.
Four Daughters also sheds light on how the country’s political situation contributed to the two women turning to terrorism and how inherited trauma as well as the generational continuation of cruelty and violence shaped the heartbreaking lives of these women.
Four Daughters is also eligible in the Feature Documentary category.
In the video below, Awards Daily had the pleasure of speaking with Kaouther about her engrossing new film.
Four Daughters opens exclusively in theaters on October 27 via Kino Lorber.
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