“A Journey That Allowed Us to Harness the Power of Storytelling”: Kaouther Ben Hania on her Cannes-winning Four Daughters

Co-winner of the Cannes 2023 Golden Eye, Kaouther Ben Hania’s (Zaineb Hates the Snow, Beauty and the Dogs) Four Daughters is both compellingly crafted and deeply disturbing. The “fictional documentary” looks back on an infamous, winding and tumultuous Tunisian saga involving five women: the titular quartet of older siblings Ghofrane and Rahma and youngest Eya and Tayssir, along with their mother Olfa Hamrouni. The younger daughters appear as themselves, and the film features two actors taking on the roles of the oldest, a necessity since Ghofrane and Rahma can’t “play” themselves, having “disappeared” back in 2015 at the tender ages of 16 and 15, respectively. Then there is veteran Tunisian-Egyptian actor Hend Sabri (Noura’s Dream), who plays Olfa when events get too traumatic to recount, a circumstance that happens often when such strong-willed real-life protagonists — especially the domineering Olfa — are as messy and complicated as the stories they tell to us, as well as themselves. Soon after the film’s TIFF premiere (and just prior to its debut at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival, where I saw it as part of my Critics Jury duty), Filmmaker reached out to the Tunisian writer-director to learn all about this most unexpected followup to her Oscar-nominated, Monica Bellucci-starring The Man Who Sold His Skin. Four Daughters is released today by Kino Lorber.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.

From Sundance to Spa City: Hot Springs 2023

“Everything old is new again” was the phrase that kept coming to mind during this year’s 32nd edition of the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival (October 6–14). The first time I attended the Arkansas festival was for the 22nd edition, a much smaller affair. Southern hospitality and charm, it seems, cannot be outgrown in Hot Springs. That sentiment applied to the inaugural two-day Filmmaker Forum, a refreshingly laidback series of panels and one-on-one meetings that took place at the Arlington Hotel, a nearly 150-year-old structure that has long hosted the “longest-running all-documentary film festival in North America.” The Arlington has also hosted everyone from Al Capone to Hot Springs homeboy Bill Clinton, who ensconced himself and his entourage in a private suite to catch a Razorbacks game the sole year I took the role of Hot Spring’s director of programming, causing a wave of autograph hounds to clear out that afternoon’s screening.

To read the rest visit Documentary magazine.

“We Offered to Bear Witness”: Sonia Kennebeck on Reality Winner

Reality Winner was a US Air Force vet and NSA employee whose leaking of an intelligence report about Russian interference in the 2016 election to The Intercept, which subsequently handed it over to the FBI in a bungled, source-disclosing attempt to verify it wasn’t a hoax, in turn led to her arrest. The saga has been well-documented, to say the least: Just this year, Tina Satter premiered her Sydney Sweeney-starring HBO film Reality, adapted from the playwright’s IS THIS A ROOM: Reality Winner Verbatim Transcription. Now we have Sonia Kennebeck’s Reality Winner, itself an extension of the 25 New Faces alum’s 2021 doc United States vs. Reality Winner, which is basically an earlier version released specifically to bring attention to the inhumane prison conditions the whistleblower was facing at the time. So, it’s a bit of a surprise to learn that during Winner’s first pre-trial hearing, Kennebeck (no stranger to the whistleblower’s plight, having directed 2016’s National Bird) was one of only a handful of journalists that even bothered to show up. Though she then became the only one the family trusted enough to stick around with a camera for the surreal drama of the next five years. Just prior to the doc’s NYC debut (October 11th at IFC Center) Filmmaker caught up with Kennebeck to learn all about Reality Winner—and the process of bringing Reality back to a more nuanced reality for the big screen.

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.