Painful memories are disinterred, ghosts of the past are brought back to life, sand demons are confronted head-on. With Four Daughters, Tunisian writer-director Kaouther Ben Hania stages an audacious experiment in documentary filmmaking that employs re-enactments as family therapy. The artifice is revealed right at the outset. To avoid sinking into the fraught terrain of exploitation or retraumatisation, the parameters are set beforehand for a film designed as a document of its own making. The camera takes us behind the scenes to a dressing room where we meet an anxious Hend Sabry adding the final touches to her hair and makeup in preparation for her role as Olfa. Sabry is somewhat of an insurance policy. If and when reliving episodes of the past proves too overwhelming for Olfa, Sabry will step in as her understudy. It is more a matter of when than if. As the watershed moments leading up to Rahma and Ghofrane’s disappearance are recounted, we learn the wolf that devoured them was the terror of radicalisation. The two older sisters had joined the ranks of ISIS.

When Eya and Tayssir meet their proxy older siblings for the first time, smiles of joy over the resemblance soon turn into tears of sorrow over the absence. The more they get to know each other, the more they open up. Enacting a traumatic past on screen lets the two sisters seize control of the film as fellow authors, instead of mere subjects. Doing it in controlled conditions provides an opportunity to put the past behind and clears a path towards healing. For four daughters who grew up under the thumb of an overbearing mother, re-enactments serve the purpose of making their experiences visible and their stories heard. For the overbearing mother, watching a performer take over her role creates the necessary distance to reflect on what she has suppressed.

Describing a film as “fiction” can condemn it as sheer contrivance. Describing a film as “non-fiction” can charge it with the heavy onus of truth. Ben Hania moves away from such binary thinking towards a cross-disciplinary, collaborative, confessional approach. The separation between fiction and non-fiction evaporates. Whatever gap exists is bridged to set up an interrogation into memory, shared trauma and the form itself. Memories and traumas are rendered concrete by way of talking head interviews and re-enactments. To enact is to make it fact. To dramatise is to document. To watch Four Daughters is to be thrust outside of most true-to-form cinematic experiences.

All the same, Four Daughters is not exactly an outlier. Non-fiction filmmaking has always been fertile ground for formal innovations. Re-enactments have always been a documentary staple to create suspense and fill in gaps. In The Thin Blue Line (1988), Errol Morris staged crime scene re-enactments to reveal discrepancies in the testimonies of witnesses, suspects, and police. These discrepancies cast doubt on a criminal investigation that had wrongly convicted an innocent man of murder and sent him to death row. Documentary filmmakers may deem re-enactments a necessary artifice. Critics however argue the device has become a cheap gimmick that betrays reality — and even imagination. “The essence of imagination is seeing what isn’t there — getting an idea on the basis of another idea — and the re-enactment is, for the most part, a short-circuiting of imagination,” Richard Brody wrote in a 2015 essay for The New Yorker. “Re-enactments aren’t what-ifs, they’re as-ifs, replete with approximations and suppositions that definitively detach the image from the event, the vision from the experience.”

Re-enactments weren’t a liability, but an asset in The Act of Killing (2012). Joshua Oppenheimer accentuated the horrors of the 1965-66 Indonesian genocide by reframing the national tragedy through the eyes of its remorseless perpetrators. As the death squad dramatised scenes of torture and murder in the style of musical numbers and mobster movies, the distorted mirror forces them to confront their acts of killing — and a country to reckon with its act of denial. Oppenheimer’s film represented an inflection point. In the years since, plenty more have crossed it. Robert Greene, in particular, has made himself at home in the grey area between documenting and dramatizing. In Kate Plays Christine (2016), preparing for a performance became the performance itself. In Procession (2021), performing for the camera helps abuse survivors navigate their trauma.

Taking a leaf out of Greene’s book, Ben Hania uses the process of performance to help a broken family work through traumatic memories. On the night of her wedding, Olfa recounts how she resisted her husband’s advances. Thereupon, her own sister barged in, encouraging him to use as much force as necessary. When her husband got aggressive as per instruction, Olfa beat him up and wiped his blood on the sheet to trick the people waiting outside the locked door into thinking the marriage had been consummated. The filming of this anecdote plays like an older woman watching her younger self from the corner of her own living memory. Olfa intervenes in the middle to direct Sabri so the performance matches how she remembers the night. Tools of dramatisation and documentary work together and even against each other, drawing out moments of catharsis. For example, when Olfa takes on the role of her ruthless sister, it allows her to externalise and transform her pain and residual anger.

Olfa is the only person in the film with an acting double. Guiding and negotiating with her mirror image lays bare her contradictions in the process. For this same woman who met her husband’s unwelcome advances with defiant aggression on her wedding night also raised her girls with an iron fist. When Rahma and Ghofane rebelled in any manner, she beat them without blinking an eye. At first, gothic subculture (with its fondness for all things black) presented an avenue for adolescent rebellion against a strict authority figure. In time, religious fundamentalism presented a near-identical function. Wearing a niqab became an act of rebellion. Through re-enactments and interviews, a portrait emerges of a hardened mother who marked her daughters with the same patterns of violence she endured, branding them as “whores” for the tiniest whiff of impropriety, leaving them susceptible to extremist influences, driving them unintentionally into the arms of the very kind of threat she wished to protect them against. “I was so afraid for them that I was unable to protect them,” Olfa admits at the end.

During an interlude, Eya, Tayssir and their on-screen siblings chat about breasts, periods and growing-up pains. Listening to them chat about their bodies so casually makes Olfa uncomfortable. Her visible discomfort speaks to how women are made to internalise body shame, pass down a heredity of fear, and stifle their sexuality to keep male desire in check. An anecdote of just how Olfa regulated sexuality in her household comes quite early in the film. Tayssir and Eya show a photo of a leg bent at the knee which could be mistaken for a butt crack. Only a scandalised Olfa reacted to this perceived affront by throwing an eight-year-old Eya out in the rain with two dinars and a bag. The girls were so afraid to tell their mother she had been mistaken, worried that even if they told her it was a leg, the truth wouldn’t stop her from punishing them.

Since the 2011 revolution, the cultural cleavage of Tunisian society has continued to shift. A complete democratic transition did not go off as successfully as some had expected and others had hoped. Instead, the North African nation witnessed a reshaping of regional attitudes towards religious conservatism. Secularists grew more and more concerned over the Salafis’ rising influence. Students protested for their right to wear the niqab, which had been banned under the previous regime of president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. There was a domestic radicalisation problem, as many young men and women turned to jihadist groups for a sense of identity and purpose. Like Rahma and Ghofane. Ben Hania, however, isn’t interested in how Rahma and Ghofane were radicalised, but how they reached a point of no return, where the unrest at home and across the country had made them vulnerable to radicalisation. Apart from being a film about memory and motherhood, subjugation and sisterhood, performance as psychotherapy, Four Daughters is also a war drama: of wills, ideologies, liberties in conflict.

The therapeutic potency of the re-enactments is most evident in a scene where Eya and Tayssir come clean about their abuse at the hands of their stepfather Wissem, played by Majd Mastoura. The two younger sisters bare their scars. Each line is full of hurt: “I never loved you. What I loved, was the happiness in my mother’s eyes. Nothing else. I thought that you would be the father that I had never had. But you made me hate the idea of a father... No father should do that. Why did you do that? I hate you. I will never forgive you for it.” The emotional cost of standing in for Wissem starts to weigh so heavily on Mastoura, he stops the scene midway. Eya and Tayssir explain he is denying them catharsis, aside from a chance to substantiate the truth of their abuse to their disbelieving mother. But he refuses to continue. Ben Hania casts Mastoura to play all the male parts — Wissem, Olfa’s husband and an indifferent policeman — to slam the hand played by patriarchy in Rahma and Ghofane’s fates.

When Eya and Tayssir bond, rehearse and perform with their on-screen siblings, there are moments where it feels like the artifice has broken down, like the family has been reunited again. The scene where the four warm up together denotes an active relationship. The sisters become performers. The performers become sisters. The sisters seek a coherent self within controlling forces. The performers seek motivations to present authentic renditions of their given roles. Re-enactments take us up close and personal with the family. Follow-up interviews help place the moments in broader contexts, without which our understanding of the story would be too black-and-white. Four Daughters is anything but. It is a film which harnesses the singular powers of documenting and dramatising, while letting the two processes inform each other reciprocally, for the purposes of trauma recovery. As Olfa foresees at the start, it does “reopen the wounds.” But it also illuminates a new direction for cinema as healing.

Prahlad Srihari is a film and pop culture writer. He lives in Bangalore.