Dan Webster: In ‘Four Daughters,’ actors commune directly with real-life people they portray

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the specter of domestic violence tends to carry over from one generation to the next. The sins of the father, so to speak, extend to the family as a whole.

In the case of the Tunisian documentary feature “Four Daughters,” those sins are the work of one particular mother as well.

Co-winner of the best documentary award at the Cannes Film Festival, along with the Moroccan film “The Mother of All Lies,” the film is streaming through both Amazon Prime and Apple TV and will come to the Magic Lantern Theatre on Jan. 12.

Directed by Kaouther Ben Hania, “Four Daughters” focuses mainly on a woman named Olfa Hamrouni and her two youngest daughters, Eya and Tayssir. In a traditional documentary, Ben Hania might tell the family’s story by blending talking-head interviews, both with the principals and those offering professional expertise, with archival and/or other footage.

“Four Daughters,” though, is different in that it recreates scenes with a cast of actors. Hamrouni herself is played by Hend Sabri. And Hamrouni’s two older daughters, Ghofrane and Rahma – both of whom left home to embrace Islamic extremism – don’t show up until the very end of the film. Until then, they are played, respectively, by Ichraq Matar and Nour Karoui.

Not that Ben Hania’s use of actors is unique. Filmmakers such as Errol Morris, Michael Moore and others have been using variations of scene recreations for the past few decades.

What does distinguish “Four Daughters” is that the actors commune directly with the real-life people whom they are playing. And everyone, the real people and the actors portraying them, engage in long discussions about how to portray events as they happened.

To find a complementary kind of documentary, Ben Hania’s film most resembles Joshua Oppenheimer’s Oscar-nominated 2012 feature “The Act of Killing.” In that film, former members of Indonesian death squads act out the violence they perpetrated in 1965-66.

No deaths occur in Ben Hania’s film, her intent being far more personal than overtly political. Her purpose in casting Sabri, she explains, was that she expected some scenes to be too emotional for the mother Hamrouni. Yet, throughout the film, Hamrouni remains a continual presence, making sure that the events are presented to her satisfaction.

Those events involve her early marriage to an abusive man, one whom Eya and Tayssir barely remember, and then to a second man, who ends up being worse than the first – at least to the daughters’ retelling. (One particularly curious choice by Ben Hania was to cast a single actor, Majd Mastoura, to portray all the men in the film.)

Hamrouni’s own demons get examined, too, which she attempted to exorcise by being a dominating force in her daughters’ lives. Her harsh mothering, even she agrees, is what pushed her oldest two daughters to leave home.

And that act of rebellion is key to the overall film. Aside from illustrating the ongoing cycle of domestic violence, Ben Hania shows how family dysfunction is compounded when religion gets thrown into the mix – a process that applies to those committing violence as well as those attempting to escape it.

Hamrouni’s four daughters are escapees. Just as important as the discord they flee from, though, “Four Daughters” questions the value of what the two oldest end up choosing to put in its place.