Four Daughters

Kaouther Ben Hania's film competed in the main Cannes competition in 2023 — rare for a documentary — took the Golden Eye for best documentary, and went on to an Academy Award nomination and the César. It is a French-Tunisian-German-Saudi production, and formally it is one of the boldest non-fiction films of the decade.

Olfa Hamrouni, a Tunisian mother, lost two of her four daughters to Islamic State recruitment in 2016. Rather than interview her about it, Ben Hania stages the family's history as a production: the two younger daughters play themselves, professional actresses stand in for the missing pair, and Hend Sabri plays Olfa in the scenes their mother finds unbearable to re-enact. The actresses ask questions, refuse lines, and comfort the women they are portraying; the seams are left visible throughout.

The device could easily have been a gimmick, and reviewers went in braced for one. What it produces instead is an examination of inheritance — of how a mother's own beatings and marriages and policing of her daughters' bodies made the recruiters' work easier — that no straightforward interview could have reached. It is a hard watch, and among the most formally intelligent things in the catalogue.