Movie review: The gripping 'Four Daughters' spotlights a shattered Tunisian Arab family

In 2016, a Tunisian woman named Olfa Hamrouni went public with a personal story of loss, rage and despair: Her two elder daughters, teenagers Ghofrane and Rahma Chikhaoui, had recently fled home for Libya and joined Islamic State. They were hardly alone among the thousands of radicalized young Tunisians who had pledged themselves to militant groups abroad. But Hamrouni's willingness to speak out, and to call out the local authorities for their indifference and inaction, was rare enough to generate headlines, boldly refusing the culture of shame that had forced others like her to stay silent.

On the evidence of "Four Daughters," a formally), Hamrouni has lost none of her outspokenness seven years later. If anything, she has passed it on to her two younger daughters, Eya and Tayssir Chikhaoui, who join her in recounting the mystery and tragedy of their sisters' disappearance. They reminisce about good times and bad, sometimes with the wry comic distance that comes with age and sometimes with the agony of a fresh wound.