Renowned Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania created history with her second Oscar nomination, which was the first for an Arab woman.
Her latest film, docudrama “Four Daughters,” has been nominated for Best Documentary Feature Film at the 2024 Academy Awards.
Her previous film, “The Man Who Sold His Skin,” won her a nod for Best International Feature Film at the 2021 awards.
“Four Daughters” tells the true story of Olfa Hamrouni, a heart-broken Tunisian mother of four daughters. The two eldest, aged 15 and 16, disappear in 2015 after being radicalized by extremists.
In an earlier interview with Arab News, Ben Hania said, “It’s not about one scene or another. It’s about how to translate all the complexity of this story, all the layers of this story, because it’s a movie about motherhood.
“It’s a movie about transmission between generations, transmission of trauma also. It’s a movie about Tunisia. All those themes were very important to me.”
Ben Hania started working on “Four Daughters” in 2016, when she first heard the story on the news in Tunisia.
“I started thinking about making a documentary about it. But when I met Olfa and her daughters, I thought that I could do a fly-on-the-wall documentary. It took me some years to come up with the actual form of the movie,” she added.
