Four Daughters is a documentary telling the story of Olfa and her four daughters, Ghofrane, Rahma, Eya, and Tayysir. The eldest two, Ghofrane and Rahma, ran away from home to join ISIS, making international headlines in the process.
The film is set up in an unusual way. The younger daughters play themselves, while actors play the older two sisters as they all reenact various scenes from the past. An actor also plays Olfa, and there are many instances where real Olfa interrupts the "scene" to explain what's incorrect about it or how it actually happened, while at other times the actress Olfa critically questions the real one about her views or her interactions with her daughters. It's a strange design, often creating a meta feel where you're watching a woman watching (and interacting with) an actress play a scene from her past. But, this method seems to work in that it creates an elaborate mechanism to allow the remaining three women (Olfa, Eya, and Tayssir) to tell their own stories.
The direction is even-handed, and the movie doesn't overtly frame anyone as the villain. Instead, it allows the viewer to draw their own conclusions, which is more powerful than telling you what to think anyways. It's hard not to walk away seriously questioning Olfa's parenting, but you also see her as a complicated, largely contradictory character. For example, she beats one of her daughters bloody after finding out she shaved her legs and was hanging out with a boy, but Olfa herself knocked her own husband around on their wedding night and she seemed later left him of her own accord. At another point, she tells her daughters that their future husbands own their body. Olfa's a strong, independent woman who perpetuates misogynistic views.
Overall, Four Daughters an engrossing story about a family and intergenerational trauma. For a movie with such an emphasis on female empowerment, though, it largely glides over the key question I was wondering when I walked into the movie: why would a woman want to join ISIS and enter a group where they have far fewer rights than they do before? The film never really goes there. There's discussion of the cultural changes after the Tunisian revolution, the increased number of radical street preachers, and the daughters starting to wear niqabs, but the documentary never seriously explores the question. The eldest daughters' decisions once radicalized are played out in a few scenes, but the radicalization itself happens off screen, and we get surprisingly little discussion of the how and why.
The film is set up in an unusual way. The younger daughters play themselves, while actors play the older two sisters as they all reenact various scenes from the past. An actor also plays Olfa, and there are many instances where real Olfa interrupts the "scene" to explain what's incorrect about it or how it actually happened, while at other times the actress Olfa critically questions the real one about her views or her interactions with her daughters. It's a strange design, often creating a meta feel where you're watching a woman watching (and interacting with) an actress play a scene from her past. But, this method seems to work in that it creates an elaborate mechanism to allow the remaining three women (Olfa, Eya, and Tayssir) to tell their own stories.
The direction is even-handed, and the movie doesn't overtly frame anyone as the villain. Instead, it allows the viewer to draw their own conclusions, which is more powerful than telling you what to think anyways. It's hard not to walk away seriously questioning Olfa's parenting, but you also see her as a complicated, largely contradictory character. For example, she beats one of her daughters bloody after finding out she shaved her legs and was hanging out with a boy, but Olfa herself knocked her own husband around on their wedding night and she seemed later left him of her own accord. At another point, she tells her daughters that their future husbands own their body. Olfa's a strong, independent woman who perpetuates misogynistic views.
Overall, Four Daughters an engrossing story about a family and intergenerational trauma. For a movie with such an emphasis on female empowerment, though, it largely glides over the key question I was wondering when I walked into the movie: why would a woman want to join ISIS and enter a group where they have far fewer rights than they do before? The film never really goes there. There's discussion of the cultural changes after the Tunisian revolution, the increased number of radical street preachers, and the daughters starting to wear niqabs, but the documentary never seriously explores the question. The eldest daughters' decisions once radicalized are played out in a few scenes, but the radicalization itself happens off screen, and we get surprisingly little discussion of the how and why.