Two daughters ran away to join Islamic State. Years later, their family’s story is an Oscar nominee

Olfa Hamrouni doesn’t know much about her granddaughter; not her favorite toy nor food — is it the pasta the child’s mother loves, or something else?

The Tunisian grandmother doesn’t even let her mind go there. ‘I don’t want to know. What for but more heartache?’ she said.

For now, she just fights for 8-year-old Fatma. The child has spent virtually all her life with her mother and aunt — Hamrouni’s eldest daughters — raised in detention in Libya, where the women wound up after leaving home as teenagers and joining Islamic State group extremists.

The real-life story of Hamrouni and her children is the focus of Four Daughters, an Academy Award nominee for best documentary feature film. On camera, there are many layers to Kaouther Ben Hania’s film: It’s about the radicalization of two teenage girls; an intimate portrait of a chaotic, and often dysfunctional, family life; and reflections on generational trauma, patriarchy, motherhood and adolescence.

Off camera, it’s more than just one family’s tale.

The names change, the details vary, but the nightmare is familiar to some others in Tunisia, where at one point many left to join militant groups, including the Islamic State, in conflict zones abroad. Militants have also struck at targets in Tunisia. Today, families like Hamrouni’s are living reminders of that complex legacy, the unresolved issues and difficult questions persisting years later.

‘It’s … an open wound in my country,’ said actor Hend Sabri, who appears in the film as Hamrouni in some scenes. ‘As long as we don’t talk about it, then we’re not going to heal.’

Hamrouni hopes the film’s high profile will boost her advocacy for her daughters to be repatriated from Libya, where they had been sentenced to prison, and stand trial in their home country. In Tunisia, as in other countries, some people have been suspicious and fearful of returnees for security reasons.