It's the Brian Laira Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now we continue our Oscar season series of interviews with the creators of the five Oscar-nominated feature-length documentaries.

We do this every year. Some of you know that. While most other media focused on, you know,

best actor, best film, Barbie, we do the documentary check. We started with the Ugandan documentary, Bobby Wine, the People's President,

and today we turn to Tunisia, and a film that while it's in the documentary category,

shares a lot with narrative fiction films. Words like meta and genre crossing have been used to

describe it. The film is called Four Daughters, and it's

writer and director filmmaker Kauva Ben Hanea joins me now. Welcome back to WNYC and congratulations

on the nomination. Thank you for having me and good morning. Good morning and the story at the

heart of your film, I'll tell our listeners, got some media coverage in 2016, which is how it came to your attention, I see.

And I thought I would play a little of how NPR introduced a report by Lelah Fidel on this family at that time.

One mother tried to keep her daughters from joining ISIS. She lives in Tunisia.

It's a country with a precarious new democracy, the place where the Arab Spring started in 2011.

It's a country with many links to Europe. It's also part of the Arab and Muslim worlds and is

inevitably drawn toward the conflicts of the

Middle East. More than 5,000 Tunisians, women as well as men, have joined militant groups abroad.

It can be as easy as crossing the border from Tunisia next door into Libya.

NPR's Lela Faddle spoke with a mother who wanted to keep her daughters at home.

So that was the intro to the story, and your film tells the story of that mother,

Ulfa and her four daughters, the two youngest of whom participated in the film,

but the two older girls did join ISIS in Libya, or as the film puts it, were devoured by the the wolf and you wanted to get beyond what made the news back then and tell this in more detail is that the point of the film

yeah i've heard about this story uh like this on tunisian media and uh i wanted to understand why

i mean it was a huge question mark for me. So I met the

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