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| Four Daughters (Les Filles d'Olfa) director Kaouther Ben Hania on Olfa Hamrouni, Eya Chikhaoui, Tayssir Chikhaoui, Ichrak Matar, Nour Karoui, and Hind Sabri: “I already have a rich gallery of female characters. So to simplify and have the focus on the female characters, I thought that the men can be played by one actor (Majd Mastoura) and I wanted to experiment with this idea.” |
In the second instalment with Kaouther Ben Hania (winner of L'Œil d'Or, the documentary prize at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival) on Tunisia’s now Best International Feature Film and Documentary Oscar shortlisted Four Daughters (Les Filles d'Olfa) we discussed her three natural-born storytellers (Olfa Hamrouni and her daughters Eya Chikhaoui and Tayssir Chikhaoui), experimenting with one actor (Majd Mastoura) portraying multiple male characters, loving clichés, and colours. Ben Hania’s The Man Who Sold His Skin had received a Best International Film Oscar nomination in 2021 and her intense and unwavering Beauty And The Dogs (Aala Kaf Ifrit) was Tunisia’s Oscar submission in 2018.
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| Hind Sabri as Olfa Hamrouni |
Four Daughters addresses topics such as shame surrounding the female body, dynamics of victim blaming, a patriarchal order reenforced by the women themselves, fears of impurity, lies, exorcism, and the “punishments of the grave,” which include the wearing of “shoes of fire” as though we were in Hans Christian Andersen’s The Red Shoes or the Grimms’ Snow White. All good fairy tales use the device of fantasy to speak of the realest of fears and most dire dilemmas. In a brilliant move that defies fiction as well as documentary conventions, multiple layers are laid bare. The actor Majd Mastoura plays all the men and when he breaks the fourth wall it is most telling and understandable. A bit like Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast, this is the story of a curse, which is both homemade and societal.
“I’ll be like Rose in Titanic,” says Olfa to Kaouther, who narrates and sets up what we are about to watch. Hind Sabri, a big star in Egypt and Tunisia, gives insight into her practice and how actors need to protect themselves. We hear from Olfa that as a child she dressed as a boy, cut her hair short, and was “the man of the house” to defend her family.
From Paris, Kaouther Ben Hania joined me on Zoom for an in-depth conversation on Four Daughters.
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| Olfa Hamrouni’s daughters Tayssir Chikhaoui and Eya Chikhaoui |
Anne-Katrin Titze: The men are all played by the same actor. There are some great scenes where he breaks the fiction. Maybe not Brechtian, but it’s very much needed relief when he cracks up while eating the sunflower seeds. Then later on he asks you to stop filming, for plenty of reasons. Can you talk about the idea of having all the men played by one actor?
Kaouther Ben Hania: I already have a rich gallery of female characters. The mother and her daughters are five, the actress six, and the two absent daughters are seven and eight. With this complexity of who pays whom! So I told myself with the male characters it would be complicated to bring in every time a new actor and make an introduction. So to simplify and have the focus on the female characters, I thought that the men can be played by one actor and I wanted to experiment with this idea.
AKT: It works beautifully. When he stops you, it reminded me of something Emmanuelle Devos told me a few years ago. She said that there are certain roles she would never take on because she cannot play certain people. If they are doing horrible things, it’s not for her and she does not want to perform that. It reminded me of this. Wissem, I think is the name, it feels as though it’s too much for the actor at that moment to play him and to confront the daughters with it. But I do want to talk to you about the hijab. I learned so much about the history, that it was used as protest, its varied uses. It is so central a garment for your story.
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| Kaouther Ben Hania on Olfa Hamrouni and her daughters: “All three are natural-born storytellers.” |
KBH: When you have a symbol like this you can use it in many ways, it depends on the context. But the idea of Hijab that we know, the pre-judgement we have, it’s women’s submission to men. Here the use of it was counterintuitive for me, but the girls use it to beat their mother and be better. Since she is the one telling them: you need to be virtuous! Above any doubt of sin! It’s like a revenge for them.
This is in the context of the family, but also in the context of Tunisia before under dictatorship, since the main opposition was Islamist for the dictatorship the hijab was forbidden. Islamists were thrown in jail and hijab was forbidden. So one of the ways to resist dictatorship was hijab; since it’s forbidden, we like it! So you have this uncommon use of hijab. And me in general, I like playing with clichés. I am the kind of director that loves cliché, like reenactments.
AKT: The clichés become your dough and you turn them into something totally different!
KBH: I approached this project with no prejudgement or preconceived idea and it’s a good way to be surprised and to learn new things also.
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| Four Daughters was on the DOC NYC prestigious Short List Photo: Anne Katrin Titze |
AKT: Mia Hansen-Løve said that each film has a colour and this one is clearly black and red. It’s a very red film from the lipstick to the majorette costumes. There is also the feeling of being in the womb and the blood. It’s fascinating how you are working with colour.
KBH: Yeah, I love colours and what I hate in general in documentaries, not hate, but what was problematic for me, is that when you film reality, reality is ugly, you know?
AKT: I do!
KBH: You have a lot of nonsense colour, it’s visually not …. So I told myself, since I’m creating this reality for the movie, I’ll take care of the aesthetic side of it. So you have the blue of the set and those women in black and also the red, because in all this blackness there is desire for life, for love. And as you say, there is blood also and it was interesting to play with those colours.
AKT: One of the daughters at one point says: ”Oh Kaouther, I have to tell you!” You and the camera, also became a confessional, no?
KBH: Exactly. You said something interesting which is really true, that Olfa is a storyteller, but Eya and Tayssir too. All three are natural-born storytellers. They tell me things about their lives and they are so funny, even when they are telling me horrors and I’m like laughing. They have a very bubbly way of telling things so with the time, since I’ve known them years and years, I became like their only friend. Because at the time they were kind of persona non grata in their surrounding because of their sisters and all these stories.
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| Nour Karoui, Ichrak Matar, Olfa Hamrouni, Tayssir Chikhaoui and Eya Chikhaoui |
So everybody was judging them, even insulting them, and I was the only person that was willing to hear them. So it gives me that stature of, like you say, the confession. And they have this relationship with me but on set with a lot of people and crew it will not be easy. So I tried to create on the set a very safe place, safe space for them. I tried to work mainly with women and to create a caring place with no judgement. We wrote a contract between us before the shooting to avoid all the toxic behavior that you can find many times on cinema sets. It’s a place of tension.
AKT: What were some of those things you avoided?
KBH: A lot of things, like when we are filming a scene, people laughing. Or people complaining - I hate this - people going around everybody and complaining. Things like this.
Read what Kaouther Ben Hania had to say on her contract with the audience, actors saying they are actors, how the complex layers came to be, summoning the past, Brechtian theater, hijacking reenactments, inherited trauma, maledictions, and stopping the cycle.
The final five nominees are scheduled to be announced on Tuesday, January 23, 2024. The 96th Academy Awards will take place on Sunday, March 10 at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles.
