After its first screening in the official competition of the 76th edition of the Cannes Film Festival on May 19, Kaouther Ben Hania’s feature film “Four Daughters”, the only Arab film in competition for the Palme d’Or this year, has generated huge reactions in the international press with mostly positive analyses, readings and reviews. TAP news agency interviewed the filmmaker and scriptwriter who explained why she decided to make this docu-drama based on a real story. The idea goes back to March 14, 2016 when private TV channel “Elhiwar Ettounsi” aired a program where a woman named Olfa Hamrouni, a mother of four daughters, gave a painful and upsetting testimony about her daughters Ghofrane and Rahma who joined the “Daesh” terrorist organisation in Libya. This powerful scene was one of the main reasons why she wanted to follow this tragic story, in order to understand this phenomenon and indeed everything that has happened in Tunisia over the last ten years, she added. This is how the film “Four Daughters’ was born. Faced with the enormous criticism directed at the mother, who was the sujbect of a virulent campaign of insults and abuse on social media, “I realised at that moment that the media would not help her in her case. So, I contacted her in 2016. At first she thought I was a journalist, but once she knew I was a filmmaker, I gradually managed to integrate the world of Olfa and her daughters, on the basis of a relationship of sympathy that grew day by day.’ From theory to reality, filming began in 2016 and was interrupted for five years to continue with the period of imprisonment. A period in which she took up the idea of the project to complete it and to ensure that the film really did justice to the case of Olfa and her daughters, with whom she lived for a time. She started in 2016 and continued five years later after a period of reflection. She wanted to make the film differently because the story is very intimate and very sensitive. She adds: “It was necessary to create an environment that would protect her in the first place. So, first of all, we had to limit the location to a single space and reduce the technical and film crew as much as possible, because what interested me was this inner journey and the dialogue with the characters. In addition, the film created a kind of “therapy” fed by a certain complicity between the actresses and the characters. “Olfa’s daughters are my adopted daughters,” she said. To express her great joy at seeing the film in Cannes, Kaouther Ben Hania said: “My joy was complete when Olfa and her daughters walked the red carpet,” she said, after a trip from Tunis to Cannes that was not without inconvenience due to the S17 procedure imposed on Olfa’s other two daughters because of their sisters, Ghofrane and Rahma. In her closing remarks, Kaouther Ben Hania made a “human appeal” to the Tunisian authorities to save an eight-year-old girl from prison. And it is with this appeal that the filmmaker signs the final scene of her film, which she hopes will earn Tunisia the Palme d’Or at Cannes, where her journey began in 2014.
Source: Agence Tunis Afrique Presse