A very, very, very festival circuit film with a politically urgent message, feminism, tragedy and an avant garde filmmaking form all squarely aimed at liberal awards voters rather than audiences.

That might make me sound bitchy, and the story of what happened to the Tunisian family depicted in the film is certainly sad and tragic, but it's another example of a story that would have been better told in a non fiction book (and probably was – there was a fair amount of press coverage).

It's the story of a conservative Muslim mother Olfa and her four daughters, Eya, Tayssir, Rahma and Ghofrane. Despite a culture that's pretty alien to ours in the English speaking Western world they're still four young women who want to have nice clothes, listen to cool music, hang out with boys, etc.

After decades of abuse at the hands of their father, Olfa moved out and took her girls with her, making ends meet in a cultural environment that was pretty hostile to a single Muslim mother.

But as the girls tried to get on with their own lives, the two oldest among them – spurred on by the political revolution that rocked Tunisia in 2011 – became radicalised, eventually fleeing to join ISIS.

Writer/director Kaouther Ben Hania goes full film student on the topic, introducing us to Olfa and the two youngest girls, all of whom will be playing themselves, and two actresses who'll play the two older sisters in a film depicting the story.

That's an interesting enough if slightly gimmicky device, but the film isn't actually the story, it's about the preparation for and making of the film telling the story, just as much as it is about the women acting out what happened.

We see Olfa and her daughters meeting the women who'll play her two missing older girls, sitting around with the writer/director discussing how they're going to play certain scenes and whether they'll be able to handle it because of the trauma it will dredge up, discussing costuming and make-up, etc.

And while it might have been a marketable idea to a small, progressive film company, it's pretty uninteresting visually. Even though Eya and Tayssir are both beautiful and therefore a pleasure to look at (if you're a straight male, at least), it's mostly people sitting around in rooms talking. And that's when the camera's not just staring longingly into Eya or Tayysir's impassive faces as if trying to divine their deep trauma.

If you don't know the story you'll be interested enough to hang around to see what actually happens – I'd never heard of the family's travails before and was waiting to learn the older women had been murdered in mercy killings for getting pregnant or something similarly awful.

And it's certainly surprising how at-times brutal the mother was to her girls for imagined sleights, especially when you're expecting a story about how she fought to protect them from whatever nightmare was coming for them.

But you'd still get just as much out of a book about it. I'm sure all the critics would have fawned over it because of the subject matter so they did all the right virtue signalling, but few mainstream film fans will get much out of it.