Within a few days, on January 23, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will announce its official nominees in 10 categories for the upcoming 96th Oscars. Film lovers and critics in the Arab world, and those increasingly interested in Arab cinema everywhere else, are definitely looking forward to the nomination of two documentaries by two female directors that have won admiration, appreciation and awards since their premieres at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. Both were hybrid documentary narratives, and both were among the 15 finalists in the Oscars shortlists for Best International Feature and Best Documentary Feature: Four Daughters by Tunisian director Kaouther ben Hania; and The Mother of All Lies, by Moroccan director Asmae El-Moudir.
Since their screening at Cannes, an invisible thread has connected the two films’ journeys. At the Cannes, they shared the Golden Eye for best documentary prize though Four Daughters competed for the Palme d’Or and The Mother for All Lies was in the Un Certain Regard programme, where El-Moudir also won the best director prize. Ben Hania’s film is the first participation of a Tunisian production in Cannes’ main competition since Abdellatif Ben Ammar’s A Simple Story in 1970. The film also marks a return to the international feature Oscars race for Ben Hania, whose The Man Who Sold His Skin became Tunisia’s first-ever Oscar nomination in 2021.
Four Daughters went on to win over a Special Mention at the Chicago International Film Festival, the Maysles Brothers Award for Best Documentary at Denver International Film Festival, the IDA Award for best writing of the International Documentary Association (where The Mother of All Lies won the Best Director Award), the ARRI/OSRAM Award for the Best International Film at the Munich Film Festival, the Gotham Independent Film Award for Best Documentary, the FIPRESCI prize at the 35th Annual Palm Spring International Film Festival (a prize for which The Mother of All Lies was also nominated). The film had its Middle East premiere at the Red Sea International Film Festival (where The Mother of All Lies was also screened) and won the Al-Sharq Award for Best Documentary.
For its part The Mother of All Lies also won the top award at the 20th Marrakech International Film Festival, marking the first time a Moroccan film has ever received the coveted Etoile d’Or, and the Best Documentary Award at the Durban International Film Festival, among other prestigious awards. But there is more in common between the two films than honours and awards. Both take a fresh, creative approach to narrative and structure, and both tackle highly sensitive themes in a deeply personal way.
Four Daughters focuses on Olfa, a Tunisian mother of four daughters. One day, her two elder daughters disappear. To make up for their absence, Kaouther ben Hania invites in professional actors, inventing a unique cinematic experience that will lift the veil on Olfa and her daughters’ life stories. Together they go on an intimate journey of hope, rebellion, violence, transgression and sisterhood that questions the very foundations of our societies. It turns out Olfa’s two eldest daughters have joined a Jihadist group in Tunisia, before disappearing in Libya, leaving the mother and two younger sisters to an ambiguous fate surrounded by questions about their responsibility for past and present. These questions do not represent this small family alone, but rather dig up the roots of female discontent in Arab societies.
With the bereaved family, the director embarks on a journey of collective questions not by reenacting actual scenes from the characters’ lives but rather through the actors interacting with the mother and two daughters. Everyone tries to explore the roots of what happened, by revisiting the feelings, attitudes, and actions, both declared and the unspoken. The journey does not yield answers, but rather more questions not only about the fate of the family and the two absent daughters, but also the thin line between truth and illusion, acting and reality, and the game of people putting themselves in each others’ shoes.
“Olfa fascinated me right from the start,” Ben Hania says. “She was the embodiment of a mother with all of her contradictions, her ambiguities, her troubled areas. Her complex, terrible story haunted me and I had a desire to explore it, to understand it. What interested me in Olfa was that her story is about women, about a mother and about daughters.” The director justifies her choice of narrative style by citing a dilemma: “How to revive memories without embellishing or changing them, without playing the good guy, without sugar-coating the truth? How to succeed in recapturing what took place and what is no longer there? How to face up to the truth of one’s own past years later? How to help the real person to be real and not to play a role in front of the camera?”
According to Ben Hania, she realised the best way to put Olfa back in the domain of reality and her own memories was to make a documentary on preparations for a fiction film she knew would never see the light. Based on everything that Olfa had told her, she drafted a script involving the two young daughters, Eya and Tayssir, through which the actors could meet the real-life protagonists.
“Olfa needed to be confronted with professional actors. From now on, they would be the actors, not her. They would serve as eye-openers for Olfa and her daughters to help them to find their inner truth. I needed actors to play her absent daughters and I needed an actor to question her, to help her to understand some of the major events in her life. It wasn’t the reconstitution of the memories themselves that interested me but the exchanges between Olfa and her daughters in the attempt to achieve this. My role in this film was that of director, that of guiding them, searching with them while Olfa recounted and analysed significant episodes in her life in great detail.”
In her own words, the daughters were looking for something that was missing. They wanted to challenge the authority of their mother who had always embodied both father and mother figures and who wanted to repress their sexuality. Since they did not have the tools to do so, they became, as one of them said, “God’s chosen ones.” This gave them the illusion of transcendence and the ability to impose their will on the world.
“I think that this film documents the different relationships to death and to life which sometimes run through adolescents in a confused manner. I would say that it is primarily a film about adolescence, this chasm between childhood and adulthood, where suddenly we seek to understand, and even to experiment with, the idea of death. But even as we play with death, it is the period of our lives when we are searching for an ideal of life while worrying about our social environment and the fate of all humanity.”
Four Daughters is written and directed by Kaouther ben Hania, stars Hend Sabri in the role of Olfa, Majd Mastoura in the role of different men, Nour Karoui in the role of Rahma Chikhaoui, Ichraq Matar in the role of Ghofrane Chikhaoui, and Olfa Hamrouni, Eya Chikhaoui, Tayssir Chikhaoui as themselves.
***
In The Mother of All Lies, by contrast, the young Moroccan filmmaker Asmae El- Moudir decides to find out why she only has one photograph from her childhood in which the girl in the picture, as it turns out, isn’t even her. The film is written, directed, edited and produced by her (and co-produced by Marc Lotfy), and it is a unique project in that she decides to explore the past and its mysteries through a handmade replica of the Casablanca neighbourhood where she grew up. There, she begins to interrogate the tales her mother, father and grandmother tell of their home and their country. Slowly, she starts to uncover the layers of deception and intentional forgetting that have shaped her life. The truth is hard to face, but El- Moudir begins to pull what is real up to the surface.
In an atmosphere that combines surrealism and realism, Asmae invites all the family members to the soundstage that resembles a miniature city and begins asking probing questions, revealing the story, allowing her family members to speak. She captures their stories, and sometimes also the pain and anger that results from being exposed to real-life stories that feel like dreams. It is as if the film is a journey into the collective unconscious. “I had to constantly compensate for the lack of a visual archive,” El-Moudir says. “To partly rebuild my memories, I decided to create a miniature replica of the Sebata district and of our house. It was a way to freely reenact the facts through the memories of each one of us. My story is made of memories of the little girl I was and of memories told by my parents and grandmother.”
She asks her father, a mason who built many houses in Casablanca and other cities, to build the miniatures of their house and their district, where he had always lived. He designed the structure of these tiny settings with the same materials he used to build their houses. Then she worked with a decorator to make these miniatures as realistic as possible, to be able to recognise the house in which they all lived. “With the miniatures I showed everyday life in our house, life in the district when I was a child, and the power structure inside our home. They allowed us to understand the family’s mechanism, the way we interact with each other, the problems we face every day. On the other hand, the present time is represented by real images and focuses on the investigation in the cemetery and testimonies from my neighbours.”
The miniatures connect all the threads of the story. They enable her to retell her childhood memories but also to reenact the day of the Bread Riots in 1981. “These are key moments that connect our personal lives with the country’s history. My father often tells me that in 1981 he was building walls in army officers’ houses and that in those days he had no political conscience. Today, with some distance, he can better understand the events he experienced at the time. It is with this new conscience that he built the miniature district. By giving voice to myself as a child and as an adult, even though they might contradict each other, I allowed myself to examine the stories that made me who I am. My voice became a key element leading the film and the viewer’s experience. My questions and the memories I fantasised, between fiction and reality, between truth and lies, show how difficult it is to build one’s identity when all your memories are unreliable.”
* A version of this article appears in print in the 18 January, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
Short link: