The coming of age and road movie are two genres that never go out of fashion, with both having been altered and spun-off seemingly to capacity. However, Nadia Fall's "Brides" offers a truly worryingly unique play on both - two young girls who take a road trip from the UK to the Syrian border to join ISIS after consuming propaganda on social media. From the film's description, it could have been filmed from completely different perspectives - from a gritty realist piece that feels more like Panorama or a Four Lions satirical buddy comedy. The tone chosen is somewhere in the middle - pushing your capacity to empathise and mixing incredibly complex issues of radicalisation and race with universal truths on teenage rebellion and girlhood.
So my first question was would you consider the film a road movie?
I definitely would. It's all sorts of things and sometimes it's sort of genre defying. But definitely for me it's about female friendship and those mad deep sort of love affairs we have with our best friends. Platonic love is so intense when you're a teenager. But yes, it's a road movie and in a way a coming of age movie, but there's a bit of politics chucked in there - sort of subliminally.
And I was wondering what was it like to shoot in the different locations that are featured in the film.
Because this is my first feature I had nothing to go by but what the situation I was in - so for me genuinely it was just an adventure because I'm used to doing plays in the theatre so it was all exciting to me, but I think everybody who I spoke to from the sector said "not for your first feature. You're in three different locations" and we were in Wales, Turkey, and Italy with different crews, different languages, different cultures. So every time we got our groove on, it was time to get up and pack up and go to the next. So it was challenging but I just think there's something about working internationally that we don't do so much as a country. We sort of stay where we are, and when you start exchanging and holding hands with other people, it just enriches the work.
and what aspects of female friendship were you most keen to get on screen?
Well, having been a teenage girl and in my past, I've worked a lot with young people in different settings: in schools, in youth offending, in mental health settings. I'm fascinated and love young people. And it's just, you know, scientifically, what's happening to our brain is when making decisions that are erratic and impulsive, and almost dangerous sometimes and it's part of evolution. It's a way of breaking away and flying away from the nest and adults and our parents. It's an evolutionary thing that young people have but you know, to me it's nuts that any of us survived our teenage years and most of us do because we've got people that love us and they catch us whether it's our school or our community or our mum and dad or whatever. But I think if you don't have some one to catch you and sort of make sure you sort of survive it, it can be really dicey.
So it's that kind of nuts adrenaline thing I wanted to capture and the deepness and intensity of emotion. Younger people don't have different emotions to adults, it's just I think it hits harder because it's sometimes the first, first laugh, first disappointment, first risk, it's just a lot more potent.
And how would you say that the two main protagonists differ and how did you get that characterisation?
Firstly, the casting process was really unique. With Shaheen Baig we did what's known as street casting. So we went out on social media, I think 700 people applied, saw about 400, 500 people. It was intense and so we met a lot of young people. Actors bring themselves and their own personality and Ebada Hassan who plays Doe, Safiyya Ingar who plays Muna already had their personalities and the way they got on is real. Like they're mates now and their chemistry, you can't buy chemistry - I know acting is acting, but there's something sort of deeper than that and I thought they have real chemistry.
And how would you say that your theatre directing influences your first film? Because a lot of it is just between two characters in intimate space.
I think for me, everything I do, I love text in the theatre I work lot with, playwrights, living and dead. And I've actually worked with the writer of this film, Suhayla El-Bushra, we met at National Theatre doing a play. So we both started in theatre and love theatre. But I think what we do in theatre, well certainly for me, is everything I do is about actors. I love actors. I always want to be around them. They're just charismatic and complicated artists and they see the world. And they have to do something that you and I don't do: completely expose themselves and they're completely and utterly naked if they do it right and that takes a lot of courage and bravery.
That's what I bring from theatre is actor whispering and also the joy of talking to them. Though film is a very visual medium and I can imagine and I've been told there's film directors that don't engage with the actors as much. We wanted to tell this story from the girls point of view so yes the the vistas of the road movie but more than that.
There was a fantastic film I saw about being a young woman and and abortion called Never Rarely Sometimes Always - and you know, the girls go to New York, but you don't see the Empire State Building. What you see is their face, their eyes, and their reaction to the world. And I think that's intimate, and I think that's what we were trying to do.
To what extent would you say this is a political film? And what would be the political message if so?
Well, I don't believe in cod liver oil. You know, that doesn't make sense to you. But basically, I don't believe in giving an audience something that's just good for them. I have to lead with the story, I have to lead with the art. I don't think, I want to make a film about, you know, radicalisation or racism or... that's not how we begin. We begin with the story.
But as artists, we live in a world and we have an opinion about it and when we, it's our job however uncomfortable it may be is to hold up a mirror to the world, help everybody else see what's going on. And you know it is true I grew up as an Asian kid and Suhayla the writer grew up as a young mixed heritage black woman in London and we first hand have gone through what it feels like to be othered and how that hurts and how you have to prove yourself and I think you know there's a bit of the both of us in the story in the two girls so it's about that it's about you know world politics and how it affects us on a very molecular level you know we've got wars and fires raging around the world you know we've got at the moment we've got the Gaza situation there's famine, there's Sudan, there's so much going on and you know, it affects us, it affects us, mental health and the feeling of...
Why should we get up in the morning? This world is going down the pan. But it's to remind us, this film, of empathy. Put yourself in someone else's shoes. Imagine. And once you do that, you can't unsee, you can't un-empathise. And I think that's what this film is trying to do.
The young people that made this journey or a similar journey were vilified in the press as monsters, as demons, as let's take away their city. It's like, so now they're not your children. They're only your children if they're useful to you. And that's, othering on another level.
It's funny because the social media in it is all real. And comes from real stuff and these little glimpses of certain politicians that we thought were gone out of our lives and they're back with a vengeance. So there is a nod to that. Sadly, this film doesn't become less relevant. Frighteningly, it feels like it's more on the money than ever before.