Only their teenage faces are visible, wrapped in black hijabs. They were around 15 and 16 years old respectively when they became involved with the Islamic State, classified as a terrorist organization by several Western governments.
His destiny was “to be devoured by the wolf”Kaouther Ben Hania, the director of the documentary, tells the viewer, referring to the story of Little Red Riding Hood.
Ben Hania earned his second Oscar nomination thanks to Four Daughters, this time in the documentary category.
In 2021 he obtained his first nomination in the international film category for the drama The man who sold his skin (The Man Who Sold His Skin), which is regarding a Syrian refugee who sells the skin on his back to an artist, as if it were a canvas, in exchange for a Schengen visa.
Four Daughters tells the story of mother Olfa and her daughters Eya, Tayssir, Ghofrane and Rahma, through the memory of the events that led the older sisters to join the Islamic State.
This is a fascinating and disturbing tale of female generational trauma, intertwined with Tunisian history.
Terrorist women
Ben Hania was interested in what might motivate a young woman to join a group like the Islamic State.
“We are used to men doing this and it is quite new that women are also involved with terrorism. I think I wanted to understand why young women are attracted to this,” she told the BBC.
“One of the ideas that I found very contradictory is that Ghofrane and Rahma sought freedom. They wanted to free themselves from their mother’s oppression. They wanted to prove to their mother and her father that they were worthy. So, it is surprising to me that the desire for freedom and seeing other horizons might have taken them there.”
There are many photos of young women like the Chikhaoui sisters, who fled to join the Islamic State during the height of the group’s terrorist attacks and occupation maneuvers.
A 2018 report from King’s College London estimated that 4,761 foreign citizens They were linked to the activities of this organization in Iraq and Syria between 2013 and 2018.
Like Ben Hania, the media is also interested in the idea of the female terrorist. Those who join such groups can be judged as harshly as their male peers.
A London teenager, Shamima Begumwho joined the Islamic State when she was 15, was recently stripped of her British citizenship, although her lawyers appealed on the grounds that she had been manipulated by the organisation.
“There are the headlines (of the news),” said Ben Hania. “But what’s behind the headlines? For this you need time and that is why cinema exists.”
What is memorable regarding Cuatro Hijas is the way in which Ben Hania gets to the root of why the Chikhaoui sisters made these decisions.
In addition to inviting the mother and two youngest daughters to participate, the director asked two actresses, Ichrak Matar and Nour Karoui, to play the roles of Ghofrane and Rahma, while the Tunisian-Egyptian star Hend Sabry plays Olfa when the Memories may become too distressing for her.
A Tunisian actor, Majd Mastoura, plays all the male characters, a dramatic device adopted by the director to highlight the female characters.
A tragic cycle of abuse
Ben Hania emphasizes that the film is not a “docudrama” nor does it resemble a documentary like The Act of Killing, by Joshua Oppenheimer, nominated for the Oscar in 2012, which asked former leaders of Indonesia’s death squads to reenact their crimes.
“Although there are actors, the acting roles are very small in the film and they act as people, sharing their thoughts and questions with Olfa and her two daughters,” Ben Hania explained.
“Maybe we might call it a ‘documentary goal‘because it is a film regarding a film that is being made with real actors and characters.’
“I started filming a hidden camera documentary, but I quickly realized that it was not interesting, I needed to go deeper into this story, so I borrowed tools from fiction, mainly from cinema, to go further and tell this story in a single way. better and deeper way,” he explained.
“I brought actors to meet with Olfa and the two youngest daughters, the real characters, so that they might direct the actors and express their memories regarding what happened,” said the director.
“It’s a dialogue, you see, between the actor and the real character. It is the story of the transmission of violence from mother to daughter, what the mother calls a ‘curse.'”
What emerges from the film is that Olfa Hamrouni suffered abuse when she was young. She remembers that when she was a teenager she tried to protect her own mother and sisters from sexual violence by hitting herself.
When she married the father of her daughters, her own sister urged the groom to treat Olfa rudely in order to consummate the marriage once and for all. But Olfa punched the boyfriend and used that blood to stain the sheets, as evidence that they had had sex.
Olfa later raised her daughters alone and became violent with them, fearing that they would become what the film calls “whores.” For example, Olfa remembers hitting Ghofrane when she dyed her hair and shaved her legs.
At the end of the film, the mother tells the filmmaker that she is “like the cat, who fears for her babies and eats them. I was so afraid for them that I mightn’t protect them. “I didn’t eat them, but I lost them.”
“Olfa refers to this generational cycle as ‘the curse,’” Ben Hania explained. “What she experienced when she was a child and teenager was exactly the same thing she did to her daughters.”
“During the film she understood what was happening to her and how this legacy of trauma also affected her daughters. The good thing is that at one point the actors tell him: ‘We all do this. We transfer to our daughters what we inherit from our mothers and finally we reach the generation that says: ‘Enough!’ “We don’t want this anymore.”
“The eldest daughters had a very violent reaction and said ‘no’ to this cycle, perhaps the two youngest ones will be saved. They are the hope in this film,” said Ben Hania.
Authority over mother
Seeking safety for their mother was perhaps what partly motivated Ghofrane and Rahma to first wear hijabs and then niqabs, the veil that only reveals the eyes and which, according to the film, was rarely worn in public before the Revolution. Tunisian 2011.
However, radicalization became a way of asserting the young women’s authority over Olfa.
“What radicalization offered them was the possibility of reversing the power dynamic with their mother. They can lecture their mother and the people who lecture them regarding their sexuality,” she noted.
“The paradoxical thing regarding this story is that the patriarchy is not all the men played by Majd Mastoura, but it is Olfa as the guardian of the patriarchy. “She was the one who put pressure on her daughters,” said the filmmaker.
“And since they were beautiful girls, they had to refute that they would turn bad or become ‘whores,’ as they say in the movie. “When you have this perpetual accusation for being a woman, you have to find a way to defend yourself.”
The time of monsters
Ben Hania warned that adolescence was also a favorable period for the radicalization of Ghofrane y Rahma.
After the instability of the 2011 Tunisian Revolution and the rise of the Islamic State, many Tunisians were attracted to the idea of joining the group in Libya, Iraq and Syria. It is estimated that up to 6,000 Tunisians joined the organization in 2015.
“I think of that quote from the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci that says: ‘The old world is dying and the new world is struggling to be born. Now is the time of monsters“said the filmmaker.
“I was talking regarding a Europe between two worlds, but you might also say regarding the Arab Spring and the rise of the Islamic State. At twilight, monsters appear,” she explained.
“The revolution and the Arab Spring shook the region’s dictatorships, but the new world, the fruit of this revolution, freedom and democracy, were not yet there. So, you have all these monsters playing while the new world takes a while to arrive. “Olfa’s daughters were in this place with the monsters.”
The names of Ghofrane and Rahma Chikhaoui made headlines in Tunisia in 2015 when it emerged that they had joined the Islamic State. Olfa would appear on Tunisian television saying that she had warned the authorities that her daughters were becoming radicalized, she had even asked that they lock Rahma up to prevent her from fleeing.
Later, the young women were captured in Libya and in 2023 they were sentenced to 16 years in prison. Ghofrane’s eight-year-old daughter Fatma grows up in a Libyan prison with her mother.
Ben Hania said his film is still showing in cinemas in Tunisia, almost six months following its release. However, plans to allow the sisters to return to Tunisia to stand trial, or to allow Fatma to be released from prison, have so far been unsuccessful.
Perhaps the most moving moment in the documentary is when Eya Chikhaoui is asked what she would say to her sisters if she might see them once more: “This family destroyed you, I will not let it destroy me.”
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