12/08/2024 - Kurdwin Ayub’s second feature brings clashing worlds together, attempting to facilitate their collision through the complex constellations of sisterhood

Florentina Holzinger, Andria Tayen and Nagham Abu Baker in Moon

Just two years on from her raw-energy-charged debut, Sonne [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Kurdwin Ayub
film profile], young Vienna-based Kurdish filmmaker Kurdwin Ayub has come up with another story about a rebellious girl, set in Austria and Jordan. Once again, electronic gadgets – this time mostly used as tools for liberation – play a crucial role in the plot, while the leaps between realities are fairly physical. Somewhat unsurprisingly, coming so shortly after Ayub’s first feature, this second effort feels undercooked, but it’s still intriguing owing to its tension-escalating narrative and its orientation towards a wider audience thanks to its straightforward, thriller-like plot. Moon [+see also:
interview: Kurdwin Ayub
film profile] has just celebrated its world premiere in the International Competition of the 77th Locarno Film Festival and is one of eight titles in the section made by female directors.

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Former martial artist Sarah (borrowing the determined eyes of Florentina Holzinger) is having a hard time making ends meet as a trainer, a fact her settled, older sister anxiously reminds her of. A job offer for a personal trainer in Amman suddenly pops up, which Sarah blindly accepts. She heads off to Jordan, despite her friends' warnings masked as nasty jokes about a potential culture shock. Hired by a rich family's heir to train his three adolescent sisters, Sarah is welcomed into a spacious but darkened, gingerbread-decorated house where she’s supposed to give classes in the basement. But the girls don’t seem too motivated, failing at the first class and, in the following days, preferring for Sarah to stay with them while they watch TV or go shopping at the mall and, first and foremost, for her to lend them her phone since their own internet access is restricted. Little by little, the newcomer realises that her suspicious feelings over everything around her, conveyed through close-up frames in claustrophobic interiors, don’t just stem from her social isolation in a foreign environment. It transpires that family secrets are also hidden behind the walls of this big house in which the sisters are held hostage, and their gradual revelation forms the dramaturgical foundation upon which the film’s otherwise shaky integrity rests.

Despite this seeming state of affairs, where Sarah, an independent woman from a liberal country, appears to be in a position to help the three sisters break out of their prison, the reality is that Sarah herself is also trapped. She feels she’s stuck on a constant treadmill between her hotel in Amman and the girls’ ghostly house, without any future prospects of her own. Meanwhile, back in Austria, she lacks the motivation to either tidy up her apartment or argue with her know-it-all, bourgeois-minded sister. Their conflict draws an inevitable though hasty parallel with the clash between the rebellious Nour (Andria Tayeh), who wants to break free at any cost, and Schaima (Nagham Abu Baker), who has resigned herself to her fate. The state of personal stagnation experienced by the protagonist, meanwhile, convincingly embodied by Florentina Holzinger, justifies the film’s laconic yet eloquent ending.

Besides the central topic of female freedom, there’s also an intriguing social layer to the story, perhaps unintentionally reflected by Ayub. Feeling lost and insecure after the end of her whirlwind career in martial arts in the supposedly socially-protected country of Austria, Sarah makes the impulsive decision to accept a dubious work proposal abroad, practically leaving as a “Gastarbeiter” for the Middle East and ending up as something more akin to an “au pair” – servant roles we’re used to assigning to easterners working in the West rather than the other way around. In this sense, Moon also captures a detail from the economic dynamics of the shifting global geopolitical context, widening the movie’s scope beyond the immediate environment it describes.

Moon was produced by Austria’s Ulrich Seidl Filmproduktion.