Three teenage girls who left the UK to join ISIS were all over the headlines in the UK newspapers and were later all over the Middle East too after a drone strike. Seemingly radicalized with catastrophic results only one of the them is still alive living in a detention camp in Syria unable to ever return to the UK having been stripped of her British citizenship. Quite what motivated them to join ISIS was subsumed by the press vilification. Brides is a fictionalized look at the background and state of mind that might have prompted why two different girls do the same. Set in 2014 the film follows Doe (Ebada Hassan) a quiet thoughtful devout Muslim girl of Somalian heritage and her far more strident forthright friend Muna (Safiyya Ingar) a Pakistani girl derided by other students with racist abuse who takes matters into her own hands only to find herself in trouble with the school and her father especially.
From their small town school the pair fly to Turkey to make their way to the Syrian border from there and it’s this journey that makes up the majority of the film with flashbacks to their life in the UK and what has prompted them to ‘escape’ to what they presume will be a better life. Having arrived at Turkey airport with instructions to wait there and not make any calls they find that no one arrives to meet them and instead find themselves having to make their own way to the Syrian border. Along the way they meet a community of people that suggests this is what they’ve been looking for but ultimately the film suggests that what they have actually done is gotten themselves into a far worse situation that is now out of their control. Teenage girls in a foreign country at the mercy of what their predicament now throws at them.
It’s Doe who is explored far more fully than Muna with the flashbacks giving her motivation more depth – her mother has embraced a decadent and often drunken lifestyle, her stepfather is clearly an unsuitable partner for her mother. Indeed men bar one exception ( a widowed father of two young girls who agrees to give them a lift in his car) almost uniformly let them down and are often a danger to their very safety.
At the heart of the film are two engaging performances that makes their friendship wholly believable with the film playing out like a road movie that will almost inevitably not end as they the pair intend. Suhayla El-Bushra’s script sees both girls come over like typical teens as impressionable and irrational as we all are at that age it’s that that has led them into making am erroneous decision that’s a result of being easily led rather than anything more sinister making Brides a story well worth watching
related feature : How Joanna Scanlan learnt to speak Urdu | Director Aleem Khan talks about his film, ‘After Love’.
related feature : British woman converts to Islam in ‘After Love’ – REVIEW HERE
Here’s the Brides trailer….
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