Presented Friday in Cannes, "The girls of Olfa", in the running for the Palme d'Or, left no one indifferent.

Neither a fiction nor totally a documentary, it plunges the viewer into the true story of Olfa Hamrouni, a Tunisian mother who gained international notoriety in 2016 by making public the radicalization of two of her teenage girls, Rahma and Ghofrane.

The two sisters went to fight alongside the Islamic State in Libya, where they were both arrested and imprisoned.

© Zoulerah NORDDINE /

From the first minutes, the spectator understands that he is facing a singular device where evolve in particular the mother of the family as well as an actress playing her role. At times, the director is even directly challenged by her actors.

"This project is also a film about cinema, acting and memories of the past," explains to AFP the director revealed to the general public thanks to her thriller about a rape victim "Beauty and the pack", presented out of competition at Cannes in 2017.

"Therapeutic laboratory"

Blurring the boundaries between reality and fiction, the filmmaker has been doing since her beginnings. His first feature film, "Le Challat de Tunis", Kaouther Ben Hania had described him as a "documenter".

In the case of the "daughters of Olfa", the filmmaker says she was interested in this story in 2016 without "really knowing what (she) was going to do".

It was only during the lockdown of March 2020 that she understood how to carry out her project.

"What I lacked to understand their departure to Libya was the past. This past, I could only reconstruct it with the help of actresses. That's what I did," she explains.

A shoot that turned into a "therapeutic laboratory".

"There were a lot of emotions. A lot of things that had never been said before could finally be said in the open," she said.

With this film, Kaouther Ben Hania summons head-on the demons of terrorism: "I wanted to explore the transmission of violence. This violence that is transmitted from mother to daughter and which is not unique to Tunisian society."

The Franco-Tunisian director during a photo session on May 20 in Cannes © LOIC VENANCE / AFP

A transmission experienced as a "curse". Above all, it shows how this patriarchal society that annihilates women is often orchestrated by mothers.

In the political field, she recounts the Jasmine Revolution of 2011 and the inexorable rise of Islamists. "The new world is not yet coming," she replied when AFP asked for her opinion on the political situation in Tunisia today.

Still, "there is still freedom of expression and an absence of censorship that has allowed artists to speak and express themselves, which is not the case everywhere in the region," she said.

Freedom that has also made possible the emergence of "a new generation of filmmakers" including Youssef Chebbi or Erige Sehiri.

After being the first filmmaker from her country to represent him at the Oscars with the film "Beauty and the Pack" in 2021, is the next step the Palme d'Or? "We'll see," she said with a smile. "We're already so happy to be here."

© 2023 AFP