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"Four Daughters"
The life of Olfa (Hend Sabri), a Tunisian woman and mother of 4 daughters, oscillates between light and shadow. One day, her two eldest daughters disappear. To fill their absence, the film intimates a journey full rebellion, violence, intergenerational transmission and sisterhood, which will question the very foundation of our societies.
It's the story of a mother and of her four teenage daughters. When the film begins, it's astonishing to see them so radiant and smiling, when we're expecting to find women who are grieving. They're like that in real life. The passing down of traumas from mother to daughter is a recurring theme throughout this film. It's the story of a curse, because in turn, this little girl will hold her mother to account. Olfa is a very powerful character. She's the embodiment of a mother with all of her contradictions, her ambiguities, her troubled areas. Olfa’s story is well known in Tunisia. But what role was she playing and what was the nature of this trap? Olfa had been conditioned by journalists. But we've to understand that at that time, this kind of story was commonplace. We notice that in life we often behave in a way that's influenced by clichés that we’ve seen on TV or in the media. Most of these reports do not allow for the different dimensions of an individual to be explored. Yet Olfa is so exuberant, so ambiguous, and so complex that it is impossible to show just one side of her. What struck us about Olfa and her daughter's lives is the absence of men. As soon as a man enters their world, they throw him out. The men around them can’t survive them. They've a very complex relationship with masculinity. Olfa embodies something that's both very feminine and very masculine.
In a way, as all of the men have been ejected from their group, it's as if all these men are just one man (Majd Mastoura). For him, we can not permit ourselves to elicit such confessions in front of a camera. He thinks that this intimate speech should not have left the psychologists office. When you're faced with such revelations about other people’s lives, you've to ask yourself a thousand ethical questions. When you're faced with such revelations about other people’s lives, you've to ask yourself a thousand ethical questions. The strength of their resilience is phenomenal. It's a retrograde form of patriarchy that women have to assimilate in order to survive. They don’t have a choice. Olfa might not respect men, but she still embodies one of the forms of this patriarchy. When you come from a humble background like her, the choice for a young girl is limited: to become a prostitute or holier-than-holy. There's no room for nuance. And as they're beautiful, that's their other curse, her daughters chose holiness and even going beyond holiness, they've wished for death! Through the four portraits that the film paints of these young women, it's also a film about adolescence, of this chasm between childhood and adulthood, where suddenly we seek to understand, and even to experiment with, the idea of death, as one of the girls demonstrates when she wants to sleep in a grave. But even as we play with death, it's the period of our lives when we're searching for an ideal of life while worrying about our social environment.
The emergence of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, transformed the world of jihadism. After capturing large swaths of Iraq and Syria in 2014, the Islamic State attracted tens of thousands of foreigners who sought to build a new Islamic society in a modern caliphate. They included engineers, accountants, teachers, grandparents, and teenage girls, as well as fighters. They reinvigorated existing jihadist movements and galvanized a new wave of support for jihadism generally. In 2014, ISIS seemed to eclipse al-Qaeda. But al-Qaeda, the vanguard of the global jihadist movement, is seeking to reclaim its primacy. It has built support among local jihadist groups in the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, and the Caucasus. Core leaders still provide overall directives, although they've also dispersed among affiliates. Advisors help groups define local goals and targets. Al-Qaeda has played the long game, and it may prove to be a more enduring model than the Islamic State. But the jihadist spectrum is also far more diverse today than it was on 9/11. Tunisian nationals make up the largest number of foreign fighters affiliated with ISIS in Syria, Iraq, and Libya. As ISIS gains a stronger grip in neighboring Libya, the issue of youth radicalization in Tunisia is more pressing than ever. ISIS is highly effective and organized in using social media platforms to recruit foreign and local fighters across national borders.
The paper examines ISIS’s use of sophisticated online propaganda strategies to recruit young Tunisians and proposes concrete ways to improve the gov- ernment’s thus far lackluster response. Fighting the online and offline recruitment efforts of terrorist groups should include not only monitoring online content that incites violence but also more constructive measures such as building platforms to connect government with the population, from using social media to encourage civic engagement to crowdsourcing in policy making. How did ISIS manage to successfully recruit a person as ordinary as Olfa’s daughter's and convince them to commit a terrorist attack on such a scale? There are a plethora of reasons why Tunisian men and women flock to join ISIS at home and abroad. Regardless of their diverse motivations, ISIS has shown itself to be highly effective at recruiting foreign and local fighters across borders, using sleek online propaganda and social media platforms. In Olfa’s case, there's no evidence that her daughters were recruited online by ISIS. Nevertheless the threat of online recruitment and radicalization by Islamist terrorist groups remains very high. ISIS is one of the biggest threats to Tunisia’s stability and democratic consolidation as it is getting a stronger hold over parts of neighboring
After the revolution in Tunisia, the new government tolerated jihadist-Salafist discourse as part of its commitment to freedom of expression and beliefs. Such discourse in fact further strengthened the message that jihad is a duty of Muslims in times of war, for example in the war in Syria. Hungry for change, young men and women fell victim to such narratives, only to be disappointed later. Friends and family of some of the Tunisian fighters have reported that they've often regretted going to Syria after discovering a different reality. In fact, the number of returnee fighters to Tunisia is also the highest globally. While this number could signal a threat that terrorism will be reimported home, the returnees are a very valuable source of information for learning more about the motivation behind radicalization and designing proactive measures accordingly. For this to materialize, however, de-radicalization programs have to be in place to rehabilitate returnees, win their trust, give amnesties in return for their readiness to peacefully engage with society and to cooperate to prevent further radicalization. Jihadism has evolved dramatically and traumatically since the 9/11 attacks. Movements, leaders, targets, tactics, and arenas of operation have all proliferated in ways unimagined in 2001.
How to revive memories without embellishing or changing them, without playing the good guy, without sugar-coating the truth? How to succeed in recapturing what took place and what is no longer there? How to face up to the truth of one’s own past years later? The girls are looking for something that's missing. They want to challenge the authority of Olfa who has always embodied both their father and mother figure and who wanted to repress their sexuality. Since they did not have the tools to be able to do so, they became, as one of them said, 'God’s chosen ones'. This gave them the illusion of transcendence to try and impose their desires on the world. This film documents the different relationships to death and to life that sometimes run through adolescents in a confused manner.
However, taking a deeper look at the contradictions, the sensations, the emotions, requires time that journalists do not have. It is the role of cinema to explore these areas, these ambiguities of the human spirit. It's the role of cinema to explore these areas, these ambiguities of the human spirit. However, taking a deeper look at the contradictions, the sensations, the emotions, requires time that journalists do not have. The line needed to become blurred because we spend our time acting in life and even more so in front of the camera. Since the early days, movies enjoyed exploring the tenuous relationship between fiction and documentary. It's a common thread that runs through all films. This film is a therapeutic laboratory in which memories can be recaptured.
Written by Gregory Mann
