Many recent films focused on the phenomenon of fundamentalist Islamic militias recruiting the young in Europe as well as the Arab world. They sought to explore the reasons behind such young people slipping into the abyss of hateful ideology. Most start with the sudden disappearance of a boy, who resurfaces as an extremist militiaman.

Tunisian filmmaker Mohamed Ben Attia’s fiction feature Weldi (Dear Son, 2018), for example, is the story of a family whose only son suddenly leaves to join a Jihadi group in Syria. It shows the agony of the father as he attempts to follow him, through Turkey, in the vague hope that he can save him. Italian filmmakers Davide Rizzo and Marzia Toscano’s documentary feature After the Bridge (2023) explores the feelings of an Italian woman who divorces her Moroccan husband, having converted to Islam, and returns to Italy with her teenage son, who is recruited by IS to take part in the 2017 London Bridge terrorist attack only to end up being killed by British police.

Kaouther Ben Hania’s latest film tackles the same theme, but manages to delve into much deeper social and political questions. Banat Olfa (Four Daughters, 2023) went on the festival circle and won 21 awards including Cannes’ Golden Eye in 2023 and the César for best documentary in 2024. It was also nominated for an Academy Award. Recently screened at Zawya Cinema, it aired on ART for the first time last week.

Banat Olfa is the story of a Tunisian mother, Olfa Hamrouni, and her four daughters: Rahma, Ghofrane, Eya and Tayssir Chikhaoui. Rahma and Ghofrane joined IS, marrying two members of the extremists group. It seems Olfa’s tragedy went viral, prompting Ben Hania to explore the topic with a view to understanding the reason it happened. In the film Ben Hania combines documentary with narrative technique, devising a unique approach. Hend Sabry plays the role of Olfa in the narrative part of the film, while Nour Karoui plays the role of Rahma and Ichrak Matar plays Ghofrane. Intriguingly, the filmmaker includes the friendly dialogue between Olfa and Hend in the buildup to Hend’s performance, further breaking with docudrama norms.

 The filmmaker’s approach to the details of Olfa’s life is based on the theatrical concept of Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect, shortened as the V-effect: Bertolt Brecht’s notion of breaking the fourth wall). In theatre this concept was meant to complicate the audience’s emotional involvement in the drama. Perhaps Ben Hania used this technique in order to give the viewer a chance to think through the family’s trauma rather than simply responding to it emotionally.

The filmmaker sought to create a bond between the audience and the family by sharing memories from Olfa’s life. In some rural communities the families gather outside the house of the bride and groom on the wedding night until a female relative is handed a piece of cloth stained with blood, proving the bride was a virgin.

On Olfa’s wedding night — as acted by Sabry and Majd Mastoura playing Olfa’s husband Abdel-Rahman, but also as told by the real Olfa — bride and groom end up arguing and Olfa hits Abdel-Rahman so hard his nose bleeds. That is the blood with which she stains the cloth she hands to his sister. In this scene, Ben Hania has the real Olfa play Abdel-Rahman’s sister, further compounding the V effect but also adding to the humour and demonstrating Ben Hania’s capacity for play.

Later in the film, Ben Hania shows how, after she divorced her husband, Olfa became the sole provider for her four daughters. She is involved in a relationship with another man (also played by Mastoura, who portrays the role of the policeman Olfa asks about her two daughters after they are  arrested for being members of IS as well). Later, in an attempt to show they were ordinary teenagers, Ben Hania portrays the two older daughters as involved in heavy metal and dressing like Goths — with the result that Olfa beats them.

The film shows how did the two older daughters change their style of clothing when they take religion lessons about death and the torture in the grave. In an interesting scene, they imitate the death of Tayssir and covered her with the shroud. It is child play but it resonates differently in the light of the two girls later joining a death cult.

Most of the memories recounted by Olfa or her two daughters, whether directly to the camera, or through acted scenes, are special moments in their life. They include one of the girls having her sex period, two of them discussing their sexual feelings, with Hend Sabry arguing with the real-life younger sisters on some subjects.

Most of the time the real Olfa can be seen in the background while Hend Sabry is performing. It’s as if Ben Hania wants the audience to feel that there are two levels of reality, and the Brechtian technique does occasionally verge on overload, but Ben Hania manages to tell the story using an exquisite amalgam of cinema and theatre, documentary with narrative, tragedy and comedy, and reality with fiction. She never judges her characters.

Ben Hania has directed 12 films, including short films, documentaries and narrative films. Among them is the brilliant documentary entitled Zaineb Takrahou Ethelj (Zaineb Hates the Snow), in which she shot Zaineb and her family over a period of nearly six years, following the girl’s growth from the age of nine to 15. This film, which won the Golden Tanit for best documentary at Carthage Film Festival in 2016, demonstrates the director’s ability to tell the story smoothly.

Her film Aala Kaf Ifrit (Beauty and the Dogs) placed her in the Arab filmmakers’ hall of fame when it premiered in the Un Certain Regard programme at Cannes in 2017. She made it in 10 long shots, each telling a full narrative sequence. While her film Alrajol allazi baa zahrahu (The Man Who Sold His Skin) made an impact on the international scene as it won its star Yahya Mahayni the Best Actor Award in the 2020 Venice Film Festival’s Horizon competition.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 15 August, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly