Oscars 2024 Awards: Four Daughters is a Tunisian masterpiece Documentary.

Four Daughters is the story of a Tunisian family torn apart by an extremist Islamic group. It’s won several major documentary awards and is nominated for a Best Feature Documentary Oscar. This makes its director Kaouther Ben Hania the first Arab woman ever to receive two Oscar nominations.Ben Hania has blazed a trail with powerful and politically poignant films featuring women and is the subject of several studies by north African cinema expert Florence Martin. We asked her to tell us more.

Kaouther Ben Hania is considered one of the leading post-revolution Tunisian film-makers. Yet, she is difficult to pinpoint as a director.Born in Sidi Bouzid, where a young vendor set himself on fire and ignited the Arab Spring (the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions of 2011), she grew up in Tunisia.Wanting to become a writer, she went to study literature in France and then entered the Femis film school in Paris. Her film production has alternated between documentaries and fiction for more than 20 years.

She’s made several short documentaries and short fiction films both before and after the 2011 revolution. Her first feature documentary, Challat of Tunis (2013), looks like what French film-maker Agnès Varda used to call a “documenteur” (a lying documentary or mockumentary).

Recurring themes punctuate the films of this transnational feminist director: childhood, violence against women, religion, the possible consequences of revolution, migration, the various forms of patriarchy. In all her films, however, humour and irony spring up at the most unexpected moments.

A woman holds up an award on a stage. She wears a long black dress.Her first fiction feature, Beauty and the Dogs (2017), is shot in a documentary style. Nominated for a Cannes Film Festival award, it tells the story of a young woman’s attempts to report the rape she has just endured to the hospital and the police, all in vain, over the course of a night.

By Florence Martin, Goucher College