Director: Kaouther Ben Hania (France, Tunisia, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Cyprus). Year of Release: 2023
We start with some breaking the fourth wall shenanigans. Olfa is introduced to Hind Sabri, the actor who will be playing here in at least some of the film. Olfa will also play herself, but not in scenes which are too traumatic for her. Two of Olfa’s daughters Eya and Tayssir, who will be playing themselves, are introduced to the actors who will be playing their sisters Rahma and Ghofrane. Rahma and Ghofrane themselves are absent. We will get to the reasons for this later.
Olfa, Eya and Tayssir note the similarities between the actors and their daughters/sisters. One share’s a smile with her character, as well as a way of holding herself. This intimacy between the family members and actors is occasionally broken, when director Kaouther Ben Hania talks to them from behind the camera. As Sabri is filmed, Olfa lurks in the background more visibly, occasionally intervening to correct the portrayal of her.
All the men are played by the same actor, Majd Mastoura, maybe because the experience of Olfa and her daughters with men is universally bad – from Olfa’s neglectful father, and her ex-husband who continually insulted the girls, to a later boyfriend who, it is implied, sexually abused at least one of them. If your reaction to this is to start shouting #notallmen, well, maybe not, but when it comes to this particular family, certainly a lot of men.
The film takes us through Olfa’s abusive childhood. She took self-defence classes and did weight training to defend not just herself but also her mother from violent men. Getting married did not protect Olfa from male aggression. She challenged her violent husband, eventually divorcing him. Although she insists that her daughters should not have control over their own bodies, she restricted his access to hers, using force if necessary.
On Olfa’s wedding night, a family member broke into her bedroom encouraging her husband to use excessive force to ensure that she slept with him. When the couple was left on their own, Olfa punched her new husband in the face and wiped the resulting blood on the bedsheets to “prove” to the relatives outside that the marriage had been consummated. Before the divorce, Olfa only had sex once a year, “to have babies”, and only then when her husband had bought her something.
The force inflicted on Olfa was meted down onto her children. Eya and Tayssir report regular beatings and verbal insults from their mother. When they expressed any awareness of their own sexuality, she called them “whores” who had “sinful bodies”. At one stage, when Ghofrane became a Goth and started to listen to “Satanic music”, her mother beat her with a broom handle, only stopping when she thought that the girl was dead.
Olfa says first that she didn’t want any female children, saying “I hate girls. I never wanted daughters”. Later, she implies that any violence used against her daughters was for their own good. Clutching a purring pregnant cat, she says: “sometimes a cat is so scared for her babies that she eats them”. She tries to make a case that her violence was necessary to protect them against male violence. This does not convince the cast of actors, who break character to remonstrate with her.
At one stage, Mastoura declares that the show cannot go on, saying that it is too traumatising for Eya to relive the violence which was inflicted on her. Eya objects, saying: “This film lets me speak out. For him [Mastoura], it’s just dialogue. He’s an actor.” Ben Hania stands back and doesn’t comment, leaving it up to us to decide whether we should support the abused girl, or think that she is too young to have proper consent.
All this is a long build up to the important reveal. This is a significant plot spoiler, but as most of the film hangs on it, it is difficult to discuss Olfa’s Töchter without mentioning it. If you want to see the film without knowing anything about it beforehand, maybe you should stop reading here and return after watching. For the rest of you, or for people coming back, Ghofrane and Rahma run off to Libya, where they join Islamic State and marry leading figures within the organisation.
Olfa’s Töchter is not just a story about one particular family, it is a history of post-Arab Spring Tunisia. Scenes of winning and losing control over your own bodies mirror the rise and eventual defeat of the revolution. IS is not simply presented as an evil embodiment of Islam which came out of nowhere, but as the product of the revolution’s destruction and of the inability of the Tunisian state to provide an acceptable alternative.
This, and the family history which preceded it, helps us to understand, if not to approve of, Ghofrane and Rahma’s decisions. They were 16 and 15 when they fled to Libya, but they had endured a life time’s worth of oppression. Rahma’s husband was later killed by a US air strike. The two are now confined to a Libyan prison, and since 2016 their mother has been campaigning that they be returned to Tunisia.
There is a simple, maybe pretentious, but possibly useful, point to be made about how the film uses Brechtian alienation effects to make us process the information we are shown. Olfa is often not a sympathetic character, so is not a reliable narrator. The constant intervention of actors, the simple dress (most of the women are dressed in black) and single room setting means that we do not just see and hear the story, but are encouraged to think about what we see.
But maybe the film’s main message is one of women being allowed to tell their own story. This is not one of those films which looks down condescendingly on reactionary Islam, and while it holds no brief for the Islamic State, it also does not dismiss the organisation as a reactionary group which is so evil that we cannot try to understand it. Olfa says that her two elder daughters were “devoured by the wolf”, but this is a living, breathing wolf, which the film helps us understand a little better.
CinePhil 