By Emma JonesOptions correspondent
Kaouther Ben Hania is up for an Oscar for her documentary about Ghofrane and Rahma Chikhaoui, exploring a disturbing historical past of radicalisation and generational trauma.
Rahma and Ghofrane Chikhaoui look very younger within the photographs proven of them within the documentary 4 Daughters. All that is seen of them are their teenage faces, swathed in black hijabs. They had been round 15 and 16 years outdated respectively when the younger Tunisian girls grew to become concerned with the Islamic State group (IS), which is categorised as a terrorist group by the British authorities (amongst others). Their destiny, the documentary director Kaouther Ben Hania tells the viewer, was “to be devoured by the wolf” – a reference to the fairy story Little Pink Using Hood.
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4 Daughters has garnered Tunisian filmmaker Ben Hania her second Oscar nomination, this time within the documentary class (her first was within the worldwide movie class in 2021 for the drama The Man Who Offered His Pores and skin, a few Syrian refugee who sells himself for artwork in return for a Schengen visa).
In 4 Daughters, the story of Ghofrane and Rahma Chikhaoui, their youthful sisters Eya and Tayssir and their mom Olfa, is instructed via remembering the occasions that led to the older sisters becoming a member of IS. It reveals an enchanting and disturbing historical past of generational feminine trauma, intertwined with the historical past of Tunisia itself.
To start with, Ben Hania says, she was interested in what may inspire a younger lady to hitch group like IS. “We’re used to males doing this and it is fairly new that ladies are additionally concerned with terrorism. I feel I needed to grasp why younger girls are interested in this,” she tells BBC Tradition. “One of many concepts that I discovered very counterintuitive is that Ghofrane and Rahma had been on the lookout for freedom. They needed to interrupt free from the oppression of their mom. They needed to show to their mom and to their father that they had been worthy. So, it is mind-blowing for me to grasp {that a} want for freedom and for one more horizon can lead you there.”
There are lots of photographs of younger girls just like the Chikhaoui sisters, who ran away to hitch IS through the peak of the group’s acts of terror and occupation. A 2018 report from King’s School London estimated that 4,761 feminine overseas residents had been linked to IS actions in Iraq and Syria between 2013 and 2018.
Like Ben Hania, the media can be within the thought of the feminine terrorist – and those that be part of such teams could be judged as harshly as their male friends. A London teenager, Shamima Begum, who joined IS as a 15-year-old, was not too long ago stripped of her British citizenship, though her legal professionals had appealed on the idea that she had been groomed by IS. “You will have the headlines,” Ben Hania says. “However what’s behind the headlines? For this, you want time, and that is why you have got cinema.”
What’s memorable about 4 Daughters is the best way Ben Hania will get to the basis of why the Chikhaoui sisters made these decisions. In addition to asking the women’ mom, Olfa Hamrouni, to take part, and the 2 youthful daughters, the director requested two actresses, Ichrak Matar and Nour Karoui, to play the elements of Ghofrane and Rahma, and Tunisian-Egyptian star Hend Sabry to play Olfa when recollections may turn into too distressing for her. One Tunisian actor, Majd Mastoura, performs all of the male characters, a dramatic system adopted to let the feminine characters stand out.
A tragic cycle of abuse
Ben Hania stresses the movie is not a docudrama or paying homage to a documentary similar to Joshua Oppenheimer’s 2012 Oscar-nominated The Act of Killing, which requested former Indonesian death-squad leaders to re-enact their crimes. “Regardless of the actual fact you have got actors, the appearing elements are very small within the movie and the actors are appearing as an individual, they’re sharing their ideas and their questions with Olfa and her two daughters. Possibly we are able to name it a meta documentary as a result of it is a film a few film being completed about actors and actual characters,” she suggests.
“I began by capturing a fly-on-the-wall documentary, however I rapidly realised that it wasn’t attention-grabbing, I want extra to dig deep into this story, so I borrowed instruments from fiction, from cinema primarily, to go additional and to inform this story in a greater, deeper method. “I introduced actors to Olfa and to the 2 youngest daughters, the actual characters, to allow them to direct the actors to recollect their recollections and what occurred. It is a dialogue, you see, between actor and actual character. It is the story of transmission, from mom to daughter, transmission of violence, and what the mom calls ‘malediction’.”
What’s obvious from the movie is that Olfa Hamrouni suffered abuse as a younger lady, recalling that as a teen she tried to guard her personal mom and sisters from sexual violence, hitting out herself. When she married her daughters’ father, she remembers her personal sister urging the bridegroom to deal with Olfa roughly to get the wedding consummation over and completed with. However Olfa punched the groom and used that blood to stain the sheets that had been supposed to indicate that intercourse had taken place. Later Olfa, now mentioning her daughters alone, would turn into violent along with her ladies, out of concern that they might turn into what’s referred to within the movie as “sluts”; when Ghofrane dyed her hair and shaved her legs, Olfa remembers beating her. By the tip of the movie, Olfa tells Kaouther Ben Hania that she is just like the cat, “who out of concern for her infants, eats them. I used to be so afraid for them, I used to be unable to guard them. I did not eat them, however I misplaced them”.
“Olfa refers to this generational cycle within the movie as ‘the curse’,” Ben Hania explains. “So, what she went via as a baby and teenager, she did precisely the identical to her daughters. She understood through the film what was occurring along with her and the way this inheritance of trauma affected her daughters additionally. However what’s nice is that at one level the actors additionally inform her, ‘All of us do that. We switch to our daughters what we inherit from our moms, after which we lastly arrive on the era that claims, cease. We do not need this anymore.’ The eldest daughters had a really violent response and stated no to this cycle, and perhaps the 2 youngest will probably be saved. They’re the hope on this movie.”
Maybe what partly motivated Ghofrane and Rahma to first put on hijabs after which niqabs (which, based on the movie, had been hardly ever utilized in public earlier than the 2011 Tunisian Revolution) was to hunt security from their mom, however as they grew to become radicalised additional, Ben Hania suggests it was a method of them asserting authority over her. “I feel what radicalisation not less than supplied them is they might reverse the ability dynamic with their mom. They will lecture their mom, they’ll lecture the folks lecturing them about their sexuality,” she factors out.
“I feel that what’s paradoxical on this story, is that the patriarchy isn’t all the lads performed by Majd Mastoura, however that somebody like Olfa was the guardian of the patriarchy. She was the one placing strain on her daughters. And since they had been stunning ladies, they virtually needed to refute that they’d flip unhealthy or turn into ‘sluts’, because it’s stated within the film. When you have got this perpetual accusation, since you are girls, you need to discover a option to defend your self.”
Ben Hania agrees that Ghofrane and Rahma had been additionally youngsters throughout a interval that was ripe for them to be radicalised. After the instability of the Tunisian Revolution in 2011 and the rise of the Islamic State group, many Tunisians grew to become attracted by the thought of becoming a member of the group in Libya, Iraq or Syria. As much as 6,000 Tunisians had been estimated to have joined IS by 2015. “I take into consideration that quote from Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci, that ‘the outdated world is dying, the brand new world struggles to be born; now’s the time of monsters,'” she says.
“He was speaking about Europe between two worlds, however it could possibly be stated too in regards to the Arab Spring and the rise of Islamic State. Within the twilight, you have got monsters. The Revolution, the Arab Spring, shook the dictatorships within the area, but additionally the brand new world, the fruit of this revolution, freedom and democracy, they weren’t there but. So, you have got all these monsters enjoying whereas the brand new world is late to reach. Olfa’s daughters had been on this place with monsters.”
Ghofrane and Rahma Chikhaoui’s names made headlines in Tunisia in 2015 when it emerged that they’d joined IS; Olfa would additionally seem on Tunisian tv saying that she’d warned the authorities that that her daughters had been being radicalised (she had even requested that they’d lock Rahma up, to stop her from operating away.) They’d later be captured in Libya, and in 2023 had been sentenced to 16 years in jail. Ghofrane’s eight-year-old daughter Fatma is rising up in a Libyan jail along with her mom.
Ben Hania reviews that her movie remains to be enjoying in cinemas in Tunisia, practically six months after its launch. Nonetheless, plans to both permit the sisters to return and stand trial in Tunisia, or to permit Fatma to depart jail, have to this point not been profitable. Maybe most shifting in 4 Daughters, which sums up the historical past of household trauma revealed by the documentary, is when Eya Chikhaoui is requested what she’d say to her sisters if she may see them once more.
“This household that has destroyed you, I will not let it destroy me,” she says.
4 Daughters is on launch now; the Academy Awards happen on 10 March 2024.
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