EXCLUSIVE: Nadia Fall, a noted artistic theatre director — she’s just moved from the Theatre Royal, Stratford East to run the mighty Young Vic — has directed her first feature film. It’s called Brides and is about two Muslim schoolgirls who leave their disruptive homes to travel via Turkey to Syria, where they join the Islamic state and offer themselves for marriage to men waging war. It’s easy, and lazy, to jump to conclusions that the two girls — Muna and Doe, played extraordinarily well by Safiyya Ingar and Ebada Hassan, respectively — just kids really, are radicalized foot soldiers readying themselves to become terrorists, a bit like the real-life story of Shamima Begum, who left Britain in 2015, made her way to Syria and within two weeks was wed to a man who was later convicted of terrorism offenses. They’re not that, Brides is not that. “I can see on the tin that it feels like a hot potato but it’s not heated or deliberately provocative,” Falls says of Brides. With care and compassion, Fall, screenwriter Suhayla El-Bushra and producer Nicky Bentham, who met when they worked together on a short film called Bush, have created a movie about friendship. It’s the power of schoolgirl friendship, really, and it explores the roots of what drove Muna and Doe from their families. It’s been made in the tenderest way, and as I watched it I felt I was watching the kids in my East London neighborhood. They felt like children we all know. The film captures life. The film’s premiering at the Sundance Film Festival early Friday night at the Egyptian. Nadia Fall Courtesy Nadia Fall Before heading off to Utah, over lunch in London, just opposite the Young Vic, Fall explains that the idea for the film, backed by the British Film Institute, came from “stories that were in the headlines.” Such stories were, she says, “a hot topic at my old theater where I worked in Stratford. And just really, there’s different incidents, not just the Shamima Begum story. There’s the London riot several years ago where young people are sort of vilified and demonized. It’s almost subhuman in some way. And you just go, ‘Listen, above all we’re talking about children and young people, minors.’ Let’s just say that in the first instance. “But then,” she explains, “the idea, the kernel was born from real-life incidents in the media and the kind of rhetoric around young people including Shamima Begum. But then, obviously ours is a fictionalized story, but then Suhayla did do a lot of research around the different incidents, not just in the UK but across Europe and Australia, of women that had made this journey. Everybody had a different push and a different pull, there isn’t a one size fits all. Nor would I ever want to be that person making a film saying this plus this equals this. It’s not an idiot’s guide to radicalism,” she asserts. “It is, hopefully, a nuanced story about being a young person and how our brains are literally hardwired to make risky and crazy decisions. I mean, I don’t know how any of us survived our youth, the things that we would’ve done. And that’s how our brain is programmed. And I’ve worked a lot with young people, so I know that’s my background, so I know about that. But the thing is, if we have people that love us around us, community, parents, friends that are there for us, hopefully this energy can go another positive way,” Fall says as we pick at our Italian dishes. (L-R) Suhayla El-Bushra and Nadia Fall Baz Bamigboye/Deadline “It’s about the risk of adolescence and friendship,” she says simply. “And it’s not just a story about radicalization, although that is in the story as well,” Fall says. This is about schoolgirls, and Fall’s film time-bends and flashes back to locate the moment they met in a classroom and how their journey came about. “One thing you can do through film is really see it through their point of view in their eyes, which are different when you are 15, 16. And we explore all the reasons why they might have made this pact to run away. And also the internet is referred to in the film as well, and the kind of bombarding we all have of violence and injustice on the internet,“ she tells me. Equally, the film shows vicious Islamophobic slogans that also give us a sense of some of the reasons for Muna and Doe’s alienation. During her research, El-Bushra found the story of two boys that went to Syria and the hateful graffiti that they saw painted on the walls in their East Sussex housing estate. “So the story is actually lifted on reality,” Fall reasons. Another point Fall makes is that it’s about belonging. “It’s about the need to belong as well,” she says. “We all need to belong somewhere. And if we don’t feel like we do, we’re going to try and find a place or community that do want us.” “However misguided that is,” she adds ruefully. And also I was struck by their family backgrounds. Doe’s mother loves her, but she’s in a powerless relationship and her daughter is frightened by what she sees and hears, and she fears her mother’s partner. “Exactly,” says Fall. ”It isn’t just always the lack of love.” El-Bushra is of Sudanese heritage and brought up in Kilburn in northwest London, and Fall is of Indian South Asian heritage brought up in South London. “We both went, ‘Okay, we’ve got to admit that when we were teenagers these two girls could be us,’” the filmmaker says. “Are we that far away from who they are? And we joked about the fact that there’s elements of us and our teenage conflict or struggles in it. Obviously it’s not our story, but we really felt very close to those characters,” Fall shares. Films are little moments of time that you never forget, the best ones anyway. That was from something James Stewart observed decades ago. One such moment in Brides is when Muna and Doe are drinking milkshakes and Doe kind of slurps it. I used to do that, my son and siblings used to do that. To me, it just encapsulates the fact that they’re kids. Nodding, Fall says, “Yeah, that they’re still so young and still playing in arcades and texting boys and having a laugh in the fragrance department and trying on makeup.” She continues, “Everything I do in theater and on screen is all about reminding us that we’ve got more in common than we’ve got differences. “When we stop empathizing for people because we think, ‘Oh, they’re a different religion, they’re a different ethnicity, they’re a different this and that, they’re different.’ It’s when we start going down a really slippery slope. And I just think we’ve got to talk and we’ve got to recognize each other. I mean, these girls, you might not be from the backgrounds of these girls, but they should remind you of your daughters, your neighbors, your nieces, someone you taught at school if you’re a teacher. They’re just two young women with the joie de vivre of life,” she says, smiling warmly. “And it’s sort of what I wanted it to be about was about that love, that platonic love that you have with your best friends at school. And it’s so intimate. You die for your best friend when you are a teenager. And it’s not a sexual thing. It’s just so intense. We love our friends at that age,” she states. When Muna sees Doe for the first time, she sees her eyes and looks right into them. “Oh, you have beautiful eyes,” she exclaims. (L-R) Ebada Hassan and Safiyya Ingar BFI/Bankside Again, another tiny, tender moment that has the power to say so much. “And girls really do have these friendships,” Fall adds. “You see girls holding hands going down the road, laughing to each other. It’s very potent, and it can go the other way for teenage girls as well. But I think what we do as teenagers, don’t we break away from our parents and the adults in our life and we work out life through our friend, our best friend or our friends? I really get how they would’ve encouraged each other to go, ‘This makes sense, this crazy idea makes sense.” Fall and El-Bushra understand the psychological make-up of youth. There’s a Caucasian kid at Doe’s school who bullies her. It’s a deeply felt performance from a young British actor by the name of Mitchell Brown. The girls have an escape, if one can call it that, but the kid Brown plays is trapped. “We weren’t interested in seeing anyone as in a really crude black-and-white way,” Fall remarks. “Mitchell is the school bully, but behind every bully there’s a story.” The brilliant casting director Shaheen Baig persuaded the likes of Arthur Darville, Sinead Matthews, Amanda Lawrence, Leo Bill and Yuspa Warsama to take on small roles, but they bring such a depth of experience to their performances that the tiniest of gestures can convey a world of intent. “I’ve worked with so many great actors over the last decades in theater, but at the same time, this particular story was about the two teenage girls. So it wasn’t about having well-known household name famous actors in it..,” Fall says. “It was so gorgeous that you get these little tiny snapshots of other actors that are just in it for two seconds. But they wanted to be in it and support and they’re brilliant.” But Hassan, who plays Doe, had never acted before. Ingar is more experienced — in fact both of us had seen her in Somali Bhattacharyya’s cracking play Two Billion Beats at the award-winning Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond in 2022. “Safiyya’s more experienced than Ebada, but still at the beginning of her journey as an actor,” Falls notes. Fall had never worked with Baig before. “She really has so much compassion and wisdom around casting authentically young people, people from a certain background. I thought, ‘How are we going to do this?’ And we went out, we were all really passionate about getting as close to the people we’re portraying as possible. And she went out on socials, her and her team. We had hundreds, I think 600 TikTok submissions and little short videos. And after that we did one-on-one auditions. And then after that did group auditions.” Fall describes the young women who participated as “incredibly energetic, clever, funny, talented,” of which very few were professional actors. “As much as I was auditioning them, we left proper time in all of those workshops to talk about the content of the script and how they felt about it as young, Black and Asian women, majority of whom were Muslim heritage, not exclusively, but we really keen to try, if we could be specific. And, Suhayla and I, we wanted to hear from them how it was hitting them as a subject matter,” Fall explains. And they asked some really pertinent questions, says Fall. “Like, ‘Why are you doing this?’ and ‘How do you feel the Muslim community will react?’ There’s always the policemen in your head as an artist going, ‘Do you really want to do this? Do you want to really open this can of worms?’ But they were so positive about the script and really resonated with a lot of it and thought that we’d made the two characters very three dimensional.” Fall works in theatre with a lot of improv, and Bushra is of that world too, and she was able to script bits here and there that came from the workshop sessions. “I think for it to feel really genuine on this film it had to have moments of ‘see what happens,’ ” Fall explains. I nod eagerly because while watching the film over and over, I had the sense it was capturing life as it unfolds. “It’s just because we all know, even when we watch abstract work as an audience member, you always know when something is untrue. Your body sort of flinches because you go, ‘I don’t believe you.’ You can watch the most abstract upside down piece of work, but if it has truth in its core, you just know it as a human being. You recognize it. You just know.” All of that, I say, nodding away. Ingar was on Fall’s original list from having seen her at the Orange Tree Theatre. However, Fall had been focusing on another young woman to play Muna, but “we went through a really emotional and difficult situation where she wasn’t able to do it, just her parents weren’t up for it, for lots of complicated reasons.” Was it the film’s subject matter, I ask Fall? “A little bit,” Fall responds. “And just the idea of their daughter being an actor was new to them and they didn’t really want that. And it was really complex. And so it was heartbreaking because she was so the real deal and so raw and there was a real chemistry between her and Ebada, and we were coming dangerously close to our deadline of the shoot.” They were a month out, very little time considering the time that had been spent on workshops already. “We were very, very close to the wire. And though as heartbreaking as that was for her and us, I am really glad that Safiyya had that little bit more knowledge of being on set” because she was able hold Ebada and take her through the process of what was required, Fall says. “Silly little things like ‘eat now, sleep,’ to try and give her the inside knowledge. If you’ve never been on set before it’s vital,” says Fall, adding that Safiyya being there for Ebada was “gold dust.” Also, it was Fall’s first time on a feature film as well. “Shooting at 3 in the morning. Sideways rain. I was like, ’My God, making a film’s more like camping than it is anything else,’ ” she jokes. “And we shot in three different countries,“ she cries. Fall had nothing to compare it with. “When you just don’t know, you just go into things. But everybody since has told me, for your first film, you are mad because you should have done something set in a house in one location, kept life simple. And we were in Wales with one team then in Turkey with another team. I mean we had some, our DoP was consistent and certain people were consistent throughout, but it was then Turkey, then Sicily, and back to back. And it was different languages, different cultures, different ways of working.” I hope that the film’s widely seen and isn’t savaged by the usual village idiots. They know who they are. Fall says: ”There are girls and boys in classrooms right here, right now. That could be, go another way. If we take our communal responsibility to be all of us, they are all our children. The children are all our children. The minute you stop thinking that you need to ask yourself a question.” She’s planning her first season at the Young Vic. But there will be another film. This time a rom-com. The best ones, like Notting Hill and Four Weddings and a Funeral, “are classics” she says. Along with El-Bushra and Bentham, the three of them will make it with the same care and compassion that’s evident in Brides.
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