Four Daughters

Four Daughters (Les Filles d'Olfa, 2023) is Kaouther Ben Hania's documentary drama, and you can watch online a film that rebuilds a family's wound from the inside. Olfa Hamrouni, a Tunisian mother, once had four daughters. The two eldest are gone, so the director seats actresses in their empty chairs and asks the mother and her younger girls to live the past again on camera.

This is no ordinary interview. Olfa tells her own story while the actress Hend Sabri stands ready to play her in the scenes that cut too deep; the real younger sisters recall the siblings now portrayed by strangers. Out of that doubling — a person and her screen stand-in sharing a single frame — comes a frank reckoning with a controlling mother, teenage rebellion, and the quiet way radicalism slipped into the house and carried the older girls off.

The backdrop is Tunisia after the 2011 uprising, a country caught between new freedom and a hardening fundamentalism. Ben Hania refuses to judge or simplify, peeling apart how pain passes from a mother to her children. The film took the Golden Eye at Cannes and went on to compete for the Best Documentary Oscar — a rare case of a formal experiment hitting a raw nerve. It isn't an easy sit, but it stays with you. Stream Four Daughters (2023) online on iFILM.