Popular reviews

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  Review by ronan ★★★½ 3

  (nathan fielder voice) Olfa needed to move past her trauma. So I hired two actresses to portray her estranged daughters and had her and her other two daughters reenact everything they’d gone through.

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  Review by Maxence_oklm ★★★★★ 6

  on passe des rires aux larmes au djihadisme en un rien de temps

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  Review by Matt Neglia ★★★½ 1

  FOUR DAUGHTERS is a fascinating blend of reality & fiction in a docu-drama that emotionally hooks you into Olfa Hamrouni‘a relationship with her daughters. The setup can initially seem confusing, but the restraint from Kaouther Ben Hania pays off with a gut punch of a reveal and a thorough examination of how the oppressive system of the Islamic State has wrecked trauma upon this mother. An ingenious use of re-enactments.

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  Review by Joshua Dysart ★★★★½ 1

  A huge entry in the “Movies are People” school of cinema for me. Watching it made me a more expansive person. It’s a compassion engine. A courageous act of truth telling on the part of these women, both to the audience and to one another. One of the very few things I know without any doubt is that women are stronger than men, and here we have a good contender for Exhibit A.

  We get the “events” of their “story”, yes, and the arching context of it as well, but also, we get broad access into the intellectual and emotional lives of the Tunisian women at the center of the movie's gaze (and its reenactments). We get access to their…

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  Review by Marianna Neal ★★★½

  Really interesting way to present this story: actresses interacting with real people as they learn about the women they're portraying. Definitely could have been a little tighter and the ending felt a bit rushed, but overall I really appreciated this fresh approach to the documentary format.

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  Review by claradiohead ★★★★

  Des femmes multiples, un homme générique.

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  Review by suzie ★★★★ 2

  when i can’t find the right words, i borrow those of others.
  so let me share with you two poems by rupi kaur, taken from her book name home body ~  

  can you hear the women who came before me 
  five hundred thousand voices echoing in my neck
  as if it were an entire tribune built for them 
  i can’t tell which parts of me are me 
  and which parts are them
  do you see them taking control of my mind 
  struggling to get out of my limbs 
  doing everything
  they couldn’t do when they were alive
  
  • • • 

  look at the women in this room
  who have less space than you do 
  listen 
  hear them
  and put their words into action

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  Review by Julian (The Film Seeker) ★★★½

  So as it turns out, Wang Bing's Youth (Spring) wasn't the only documentary ushering in the return of the medium to the Cannes competition lineup this year, after all. On the surface, the reason for the omission of Kaouther Ben Hania's experimental Four Daughters in the discussion of standard "documentary" can be owed to its more exploratory structure. Billed as a sort of label-defying trip—akin to something like Kiarostami's masterpiece Close Up—into the lives of Olfa and her four daughters, Ben Hania's film instead presents itself as a relatively straightforward reenactment along the lines of The Act of Killing (or, depending on how you choose to examine it, Close Up again). What films like The Act of Killing have proven…

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  Review by lou 3

  me logging un énième film sur les ravages du patriarcat qui me détruit émotionnellement : another one thank you 😀

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  Review by joelmathew ★★★★

  #IFFK 1
  Great start to IFFK. Sudipto ji take notes

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  Review by Colin Clune ★★★★★

  An extremely honest and open look at generational trauma, this portrays what drove two young girls to leave their family for ISIS with an entirely unique hybrid between documentary and collaborative storytelling. Honestly, I’m not even 100% convinced it’s ethical. It feels like listening in on group therapy, but the real girls direct the actors. The actors chastise the women they are portraying, and we jump in and out of roleplay all the time. It’s really something and gets moments from people that are overwhelmingly intimate.

  I think that Kaouther Ben Hania gets away with all this blurring because it feels like there is a real bond between all the filmmakers. She managed to create a real connection on set,…

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  Review by Jacob ★★★★½

  Memories are shared among family, but individual recollections tell wildly different stories. The recreations of key memories allow Olfa and her two youngest daughters to not only share their personal history with the world but to concretely represent it to one another. In explaining her intentions to the actress playing her, Olfa explicitly defends her actions in a way she’s never before been able to, and her daughters openly criticize her within the artistically safe space. The docufiction form here exists genuinely to serve its subjects, rather than for mere experimentation. There’s so much joy and sorrow in the process of recreation, as this fragmented family bonds with strangers and fabricates a now-lost feeling of connection.

  Four Daughters is entirely…