Brides

****

Reviewed by: Jeremy Mathews

Brides
"This is acclaimed theatrical director Fall’s cinematic feature debut, and she proves adept at both evoking the warmth of her characters and capturing memorable images." | Photo: Courtesy of Sundance Institute

We’re all familiar with the buddy comedy trope of two friends pushing each other to find themselves and reach a shared goal. But typically that goal isn’t to enter a war zone and join a terrorist organization.

Brides takes a road movie approach to its story of two teenage girls who flee London to become Brides of the Islamic State. There’s so much discovery, and the two main characters’ friendship contains so much warmth and compassion that at times it’s easy to forget that these girls are smuggling themselves into a life with very little chance of a happy ending.

This fictionalised account is based on young women who traveled to join the IS terrorist organization as it rose to prominence. The most famous example is the Bethnal Green trio from London - three girls who secretly traveled to Syria in 2015, when they were 15 to 17 years old.

At the film’s premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, screenwriter Suhayla El-Bushra said that she admired Chris Morris’s 2010 dark terrorism comedy Four Lions, and wanted to make the equivalent of that film for teenage Muslim girls - showing them as full, flawed people rather than evil or brainwashed. She and director Nadia Fall have succeeded in this goal, helped by touching performances by Ebada Hassan as the quieter Doe and Safiyya Ingar as the bombastic, unapologetically Muslim Muna.

This is acclaimed theatrical director Fall’s cinematic feature debut, and she proves adept at both evoking the warmth of her characters and capturing memorable images. She brings us into the story with a tender, stationary overhead image of the girls rocking in and out of frame together on a big swing. Then they jump off, off camera, leaving an empty swing passing by in their wake. It’s an emptiness that their families will soon feel for their missing children.

Soon, we are following the girls on the train and at the airport, as they act like normal teenagers, drinking milkshakes and forgetting to go to their gate on time. It takes a while to even be sure why they seem a little apprehensive about their trip.

When they finally arrive in Istanbul, the plan hits a snag. They have clear instructions to wait for their escort and not answer any calls from home until they’ve reached Syria. But no one shows up at the designated meeting place, prompting the girls to take matters into their own hands and make the trip to the other side of Turkey on their own.

This essentially turns the plot into an episodic travelogue with a rich sense of place. The girls discover the country while meeting people - mostly kind, compassionate and happy to help. Certain moments, such as the discovery of a courtyard with Sufi whirling, evokes the sense of discovery you find when exploring a foreign place. It also touches on the many faces of Islam, and suggests that the kids might have been better off discovering these communities instead of IS.

Flashbacks to the girls’ lives in London weave through the main narrative to create a sense of the factors that lead to radicalization. We see some of the so-called “jihadi girl-power” social media post that helped convince them of the need to flee home in order to make a difference. We also see Doe’s home life with her mom’s drunken, abusive boyfriend - suffering that can be blamed on her mom’s secularism. But the most compelling factor is the strong anti-Muslim sentiment in the UK that did not make these girls feel as if they had a place in the community.

Whatever the case may be, the Muna and Doe clearly don’t understand what the life they’re entering will truly be like. We see the lack of understanding in subtle details, such as Muna being protective of her Air Jordans, which certainly won’t be part of IS culture.

Fall and El-Bushra recognise that these teenage girls are, well, teenagers - prone to the same irrational, emotionally charged decision making displayed by all people of that age since time immemorial. And it’s easy to find empathy, humor and pathos in their story. But of course, they’re in the process of making a stupid mistake that is much harder to fix than the ones most teens make.

Reviewed on: 30 Jan 2025
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Two teenage girls in search of freedom, friendship, and belonging run away from their troubled lives with a misguided plan of traveling to Syria.

Director: Nadia Fall

Writer: Suhayla El-Bushra

Starring: Ebada Hassan, Safiyya Ingar, Yusra Warsama, Cemre Ebuzziya, Aziz Çapkurt, Hayal Lorena Cercis, Derya Durmaz, Susku Ekim Kaya, Ada Danila Farid Mancuso, Leo Bill, Ali Khan, Fiona Helen Armstrong, Amanda Lawrence, Mitchell Brown, Laura Dalgleish

Year: 2025

Country: UK

Festivals:

Sundance 2025

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