The phenomenon of Islamic State brides, which became a press preoccupation with the case of Shamima Begum – who 10 years ago left the UK at the age of 15 to join IS and is still in a Syrian refugee camp – is now filtering through to fictional representations; they are striving for a sympathetic, intimate way of intuiting the motives and feelings of young women who were hardly more than children when they were radicalised, and somehow get more pruriently disapproving media coverage than the male jihadis. Nussaibah Younis’s hit comic novel Fundamentally tells the story of an aid worker tasked with bringing IS brides home to the UK, and now there is this watchable comedy-drama from screenwriter Suhayla El-Bushra and director Nadia Fall.
It is about two teenage girls: shy, thoughtful Doe (Ebada Hassan) and stroppy, lairy Muna (Safiyya Ingar), who make the fraught journey by plane from the UK to Turkey and then by bus to the Syrian border (with return tickets to allay suspicion) to marry IS jihadis. Perhaps the movie should actually be called Fiancées because the actual, brutal experience of being married in this situation is not what the movie wants to imagine, although the closing sequence certainly hints at a horrible disenchantment and a reality very different from that promised on social media.
