At this year's Sundance, UK director Nadia Fall presents her first feature in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition. Brides [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Nadia Fall
scheda film] tells the story of two young women in search of what they think will be a better life. We spoke to the helmer about drawing inspiration from real events and her approach to casting.

Cineuropa: Did you take any real-life cases as inspiration for Brides?
Nadia Fall: Our characters are definitely fictionalised, but Suhayla El-Bushra, our screenwriter, did a lot of research into the real-life incidents of young people who left Britain and other places around Europe to make a fateful journey like this. We had a lot of headlines in the UK media about a particular case of young women from East London who left school one day and made their way to Turkey and to Syria in 2014. Our story is about these two girls who, in a way, also reflected Suhayla and myself when we were 15- or 16-year-olds. If we had lived at a different time or if we hadn’t had people around us anchoring us during our teenage years, we might have made some crazy or dangerous decisions with our teenage brains. What we didn’t want to do was come up with some kind of algebraic equation, giving lots of reasons why someone might have made this decision. We didn't want to be reductive.

How did you decide that there would be two girls, and what were their most important traits?
We show a good dynamic between two best friends. These two are like little magnets because they're opposites in terms of their personalities: one's an extrovert and a provocateur, and the other one is an introvert and remains on the sidelines. They are opposites that attract each other. For young people, those friendships are so potent. You might not be able to talk to your mother, and you might not understand your teachers and see adults as aliens, but your bestie just gets you.

How did you find your protagonists?
Our casting person, Shaheen Baig, is a real expert in finding authenticity. She is used to working with different backgrounds and heritage, and also with young, sometimes first-time, actors. We really wanted authenticity. Where possible, we wanted to get young women who were of Muslim heritage to work with us. So, we went out on TikTok and other social platforms, and searched there. We got a huge response and met a lot of young women. The whole audition process was incredible because we did a lot of group workshops. And as much as we were auditioning the young women, they were auditioning us, too. They wanted to know what we wanted to say about their heritage or culture. We worked with young women from different backgrounds – Pakistani, Indian, Nigerian… It was nice to see that they enjoyed the story we wrote. A lot of their ideas and thoughts came into the final narrative. I also played around with improvisation.

How did you prepare them for the roles?
As I was used to theatre, I felt it was difficult not to be able to rehearse properly. Fortunately, we got a small grant that allowed us to have some rehearsals, and it was brilliant. One of the main protagonists had never done any acting professionally, not even at school. So, if we wanted to get the chemistry right between the two actresses who had to play best friends, or soulmates actually, it would have been crazy for them to discover each other only on the first day on set.

How did you choose the archive footage you use in the film?
It wasn’t easy; we really had to look far and wide to get the rights to things within our means. We had a really brilliant team that looked hard for the footage. We didn't want a lot, but we wanted it to represent different conflict zones and to be able to speak to all conflicts around the world.

Your protagonists are part of a new generation used to social media: everything is so rapid. Was this decisive for the look you wanted to give the film?
Definitely, because social media is such a big part of our whole world now. In film, it's very hard to represent it poetically, without it feeling forced and a bit embarrassing. We worked hard to try to get social media into the movie and to show that it plays an important role for the protagonists – that it affects their decisions, and that's where they get their information from. I think it became a character in its own right.