27/01/2025 - Debuting feature director Nadia Fall moves from stage to screen with a rocky tale of two British teenage girls travelling to Syria for the promise of a better life

Two teenage girls set off for a new life in Syria – the Western media would call them self-radicalised and crucify them for their actions. Some would criticise them as fools; others may champion them as heroes. In her debut feature Brides [+see also:
trailer
interview: Nadia Fall
film profile], which had its world premiere in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition at Sundance, filmmaker Nadia Fall refuses to go for any of the above, focusing instead on the interiorities of her young British Muslim protagonists, audiences be damned. Penned by Suhayla El-Bushra, the film very loosely draws from real-life stories of similar journeys, its title an undeniable allusion to foreign women travelling to Syria to become the so-called media-sensationalised concept of "jihadi brides”.

"It won't be like back home – they want us there,” says British Somali teen Doe (Ebada Hassan) – who, in the first minutes of the film, sets off to the airport with her best friend, the British Pakistani Muna (Safiyya Ingar). The former elects to wear a headscarf, quietly disdainful of her non-Muslim mother’s happy relationship with a white man, while the latter prefers to don a sports jersey and Jordans, more rightfully matching her boisterous attitude. As the duo treks onwards towards Syria in a forward-moving narrative, we also learn of the events leading to their decision to leave, and we begin to understand their perspectives through non-linear flashbacks interspersed throughout. 

Online, Doe meets a mysterious woman by the name of Hanan, while in real life, she takes a liking to the young man Samir, whose own supposed journey to Syria partly inspires Doe to propose the trek to Muna. Fall, an experienced director for the stage – also artistic director of London’s renowned Young Vic – portrays them as wannabe girlbosses, epitomised by a slightly irony-tinged sequence in which scenes of pain and destruction in Syria are eagerly consumed by Doe and Muna on social media, set to the electronic thrum of M.I.A.’s “Bad Girls”. Some clips include the black flags of the Islamic State, although the organisation is never directly verbally referenced in the film.

Brides is a difficult film to pin down: is it enough to empathise with the girls, or dare we demand more out of the film's chewy premise? The non-linear narrative serves the story remarkably well, with Fall forcing us to reconsider our judgment at every turn with new information from the girls' lives in the UK. However, Doe’s emotional connection with Samir and how he accepts her as she is could have been more fleshed out to help us better understand her motivations. The extreme complexity of their story cannot be fully captured in 93 minutes, with the film acting more as a lessons-learned joyride tinged with a cautionary tale than a claws-deep exploration of the powerful forces connecting alienation and radicalisation. After getting stranded in Istanbul with no money or instructions, their naïvety and ill-preparedness strips down the girls’ bold exteriors to reveal what Fall drives into our heads: they are simply teen girls, plain and simple.

The filmmaker emphasises that their plight is a product of extreme alienation in an Islamophobic society, the two girls facing harassment and ostracisation at every turn, from classmates and even their family who has failed them and pushed them to emotional extremes. Heavily spurred by access to social media, for our two girls disillusioned by their parents' and acquaintances’ aloofness to crises – the undoubtedly universal malady of bystanderism today – their trip is a heroic act rather than a fatal, self-sacrificing one.

Brides is a UK-Italian production by Neon Films and Rosamont Production. Its world sales are steered by London-based outfit Bankside Films.