The Wolves at the Door: Documentary Uncovers the Root of Radicalism in One Tunisian Family’s Painful Story

 

Why do we choose to tell painful stories, especially in documentary form, where we ask people to relive their trauma? That is a question I kept asking myself as I watched “Four Daughters.” Sometimes we need to know that pain is part of a story we too glibly read in the news, or perhaps it deepens a reality we think we know already. In the case of “Four Daughters,” the news story that many of us know is that two Tunisian teenage sisters were radicalized and joined the Islamic State in Libya, where they were captured by Libyan forces and sentenced to 16 years in prison for terrorism, one of them starting her sentence with a small child. We see them in the documentary, if at all, fully veiled with niqabs. Knowing just this superficial story, much publicized in Tunisia, we wonder, as director Kaouther Ben Hania probably did: what would cause these two girls to leave their families and all they knew in Tunisia? How did they become radicalized, when it seems they came from a somewhat secular family?

 

Part of the answer seems drawn from pain that makes designs upon our lives — sometimes without our even knowing how.  

 

But to unearth these painful truths, the director needs confession from her protagonists — the four daughters, and most importantly, their mother Olfa. There are two problems, however: two of the daughters, Ghofrane and Rahma, are in prison and not available for the film, and some of the relived scenes of the mother’s life seem too painful for her to recount.