X
- 2023
- Not Rated
- The Party Film Sales
- 1 h 47 m
- 2023
- Not Rated
- The Party Film Sales
- 1 h 47 m
Summary Between light and darkness stands Olfa, a Tunisian woman and the mother of four daughters. One day, her two older daughters disappear. To fill in their absence, the filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania invites professional actresses and invents a unique cinema experience that will lift the veil on Olfa and her daughters' life stories. An intimat...
Directed By: Kaouther Ben Hania
Written By: Kaouther Ben Hania
- 2023
- Not Rated
- The Party Film Sales
- 1 h 47 m
- 2023
- Not Rated
- The Party Film Sales
- 1 h 47 m
Four Daughters
80
7.3
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Summary Between light and darkness stands Olfa, a Tunisian woman and the mother of four daughters. One day, her two older daughters disappear. To fill in their absence, the filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania invites professional actresses and invents a unique cinema experience that will lift the veil on Olfa and her daughters' life stories. An intimat...
Directed By: Kaouther Ben Hania
Written By: Kaouther Ben Hania
Where to Watch
Not available in your country?
ExpressVPN
Get 3 Extra months free
$6.67/mth
Top Cast
Metascore
Generally Favorable
Based on 21 Critic Reviews
80
86% Positive
18 Reviews
18 Reviews
14% Mixed
3 Reviews
3 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Metascore
Generally Favorable
Based on 21 Critic Reviews
80
86% Positive
18 Reviews
18 Reviews
14% Mixed
3 Reviews
3 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Four Daughters is film as family therapy and family therapy as film.
By Amy Nicholson
FULL REVIEW
This is a heartbreaker about mothers and daughters, the cruelty of repression and the slippery but revealing nature of performance. And to the end, it remains steadfast in its conviction that a woman’s truth and her beauty are never at odds.
User Score
Generally Favorable
Based on 12 User Ratings
7.3
75% Positive
9 Ratings
9 Ratings
25% Mixed
3 Ratings
3 Ratings
0% Negative
0 Ratings
0 Ratings
User Score
Generally Favorable
Based on 12 User Ratings
7.3
75% Positive
9 Ratings
9 Ratings
25% Mixed
3 Ratings
3 Ratings
0% Negative
0 Ratings
0 Ratings
This film will lure you in with its novel conceit of recounting the true story of one family's loss through both the people who experienced it, and professional actors filling in for those who could not participate. Ultimately, it is the story of a "gangsta" woman and her four daughters in Tunisia that face similar struggles to women in American ghettos.
Report
Um documentário que parece um making of, e embora eu tenha todo respeito àquelas mulheres e às suas histórias de vida, achei que ficou de mau gosto certas reconstituições,meio que me incomodou o doc não assumir o que quer ser: entrevista ou encenação? Ainda assim o carisma delas em tela e a importância da denúncia me fez acompanhar tudo até o final.
Report
The more avant-garde this becomes, the more interesting—aesthetically and thematically—Four Daughters is.
The final scenes, even for those familiar with the real-world outcome, are haunting.
With so many moving parts, it’s hard to isolate just one reason why Ben Hania’s film — a vast improvement on her terminally uneven, unexpectedly Oscar-nominated “The Man Who Sold His Skin” — should prove so gripping.
Despite Ben Hania sticking to her cinematic formula “Four Daughters” is genuinely hard to forget. It will linger with you for days afterward. That’s mostly due to Olfa’s heartbreaking perseverance to find her children and a wee bit of Ben Hania’s storytelling skill too.
There is real emotional warmth and human sympathy in this otherwise somewhat flawed film, a docudrama experiment in getting actors to play some of the real people in a tragic news story from Tunisia.
[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]
Report
Fusing fact and fiction is a precarious undertaking for a filmmaker, especially when it comes to matters of clarity and credibility. And that’s where this latest offering from writer-director Kaouther Bin Hania misses the mark. This fact-based story about Olfa Hamrouni, a Tunisian single mother who loses her two eldest daughters, Ghofrane and Rahma, to the radical recruitment efforts of ISIL while trying to protect her two youngest daughters, Eya and Tayssir, from befalling a comparable fate struggles mightily to tell a coherent tale. The film clumsily mixes interviews with family members and dramatic reenactments of significant events featuring actors portraying the principals (some inexplicably playing several roles). To complicate matters, this release features an inordinate amount of superfluous material as well as seemingly important gaps in the story, often leaving viewers scratching their heads about how the narrative gets from one unrelated (and sometimes seemingly contradictory) development to the next. Add to that a relevant revelation that doesn’t appear until late in the film (with virtually no prior back story to support it), and you’ve got a patchwork accounting of what otherwise appears to be a moving and heartfelt tale that deserves greater intelligibility and a better overall delivery. What’s more, this offering includes a considerable amount of material about how this production is being put together, a modestly interesting sidebar that might make for an informative bonus feature, but the inclusion of these largely incidental segments within the primary narrative adds little and serves more to needlessly bog down the flow of the film. Given the foregoing, I’m at a loss to understand why this “documentary” (a term I use loosely) has received the amount of attention and adulation that it has garnered, especially in film festival and awards season competitions. Bin Hania has indeed established herself as a talented filmmaker in other releases (especially those of a purely fictional nature), such as the outstanding Oscar-nominated offering, “The Man Who Sold His Skin” (2020), but she seems out of her league here. That’s unfortunate since Olfa’s saga is one that appears to be well worth telling and doesn’t receive the treatment it truly deserves.
Report
Production Company
Tanit Films,
Cinétéléfilms,
Twenty Twenty Vision Filmproduktion GmbH,
Centre national du cinéma et de l'image animée (CNC),
Ministère des Affaires Culturelles,
Centre National du Cinéma et de l'Image,
Red Sea Film Festival Foundation,
ZDF/Arte,
Jour2Fête,
Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg,
Sunnyland Film,
Fonds Images de la Francophonie,
The Berlinale World Cinema Fund,
Kamel Lazaar Foundation for Art and Culture,
Cairo Film Connection,
Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers of Music (SACEM)
Release Date Oct 27, 2023
Duration 1 h 47 m
Rating Not Rated
Genres
Awards
Academy Awards, USA
• 1 Nomination
Tromsø International Film Festival
• 2 Wins & 3 Nominations
Cinema Eye Honors Awards, US
• 1 Win & 3 Nominations