The fifth feature film by Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania, Olfa’s Daughters, has just returned from the official competition in Cannes, where he surprised, amazed, impressed, as well as annoyed some, with his extreme formal hybridization. It is a form of consecration for this Tunisian director born forty-five years ago in Sidi Bouzid, home of the “Arab Spring”, who, after studying cinema at La Fémis, lives between France and Tunisia.
At the base of the film, a tragic incident. Olfa Hamrouni, a Tunisian mother, sees two of her four daughters, the eldest, abandon the family home in 2016 to join the ranks of the Islamic State organization. At the time of this writing, the two young women, one of whom has become the mother of an 8-year-old girl who has lived almost all her life behind bars, have been sentenced to a sentence of sixteen years old and languishing in a Libyan prison.
Leaving to make a classic documentary, the director quickly begins to doubt the way in which Olfa – victim of the patriarchal system, turned ogress, turning violence against men and against her daughters to protect them – devours the film.
For Kaouther Ben Hania, this character, incidentally incredibly endearing, “It’s Medea”. She therefore sets up a complex system: the mother and her two youngest daughters, an understudy actress for the mother (the Tunisian star Hend Sabri), two other actresses embodying the absent sisters, plus an actor who unravels by interpreting all the men who have crossed paths with Olfa. The result, whose mastery is not assured, is tightrope walker, and the director recognizes it without difficulty.
“At the start, the film didn’t work, it didn’t live up to the emotion that brought me to Olfa, she explains. So I had to invent something that would take some distance and bring some depth. At the same time, it was an obsession: I wondered every day what I had gotten myself into. This shooting was, from start to finish, a free experimentation, I was in this sense the first spectator of my film. That’s what I like about the documentary, which is an open form: it forces you to adapt to the subject and its characters. My challenge was for the viewer, aware of the artifices of the film, to nevertheless feel it as an organic whole. »
As for the truculent Olfa Hamrouni, lynched on the Internet because of the enlistment of her two daughters, she sought in this film proposal an opportunity to make her voice heard. Far from reluctant to have to share her role with Hend Sabri, she was, on the contrary, delighted, as the director remembers: “She made me a comment that I initially considered naive, but which is in truth of great cinematographic intelligence: she thought that the presence of this famous actress playing her role would finally accredit her own story in the eyes of the audience. And she was absolutely right. » It is in fact her power of empathy, her painful joy, her resilient feminism that make this film so valuable.
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