Shortly after 9/11, two things happened to me. I was 18 and in college at the time. And I was starting to feel different than everyone else. My mental health was plummeting, and I wasn’t sure what was going on with me. I thought, ‘I better find a place where I belong,’ and what I really needed at that time was help to support my mental health. But in my mind, moving to a new place, a new community, seemed to be the answer. That is what made sense to me at that time. To me, I wasn’t running away from myself, I was running to a potentially better future.
Shortly after that, I got the help I needed, and I started to make friends with people who also had dealt with challenges based on whatever made them different. That brings me to the second thing, when I started a job at an art museum in Chicago. I felt like I had found my people. One of my best friends there was Sammaiyah. We both loved art, and we shared a passion for elevating artists, so we hatched the idea of starting a business together. She happened to be Muslim, but in my mind, she was just my best friend. I had some people close in my life saying that I shouldn’t hang out with her because of her religion, which made me terribly sad. Life eventually took us down different paths, and it was a year and a half ago when I learned that she had died from kidney disease.
This piece isn’t meant to be a personal essay, but I felt these stories would serve as a fitting introduction to a film that could be “a catalyst for change.” The feature film “Brides” premiered at the Sundance film festival last week. It’s about two 15-year-old girls who go on a journey to find belonging away from their broken homes. It shows how there is transformative power in their friendship. The two girls from London feel they have found a better future for themselves together after they’ve been enticed by propaganda about an Islamic terrorist organization in Syria. They feel this where they’ll be able to potentially find a peaceful existence.
Nadia Fall, the director, didn’t want to tell a story about an extremist Islamic organization, but she and Suhayla El-Bushra, the writer of this film, who both happen to be Muslim, wanted to portray the thing that people don’t talk about and are afraid of, while telling the story of two teenage girls on a journey. For me, their perspective humanizes the issues they raise, and makes them approachable to talk about with people who may misunderstand others who seem “different.” In the end, we’re all the same, and as Nadia said in our interview as well as at the premiere screening, no matter what your religion is or where you come from, the people you see onscreen are just children.
I hope to show this film to the family members who were so close-minded about people they thought were different than them. These are the kind of films that will be the catalyst for real change in our world, and for that, I’m grateful. During my time at Sundance, I had the honor of meeting and speaking with the director as well as the film’s two young stars, Ebada Hassan and Safiyya Ingar. I loved our conversation, and you can still catch the film online until the end of the weekend. Learn more here: https://festival.sundance.org/tickets/online
I thought we would start with you, Nadia. How did you come to this project and could talk about your collaboration with the screenwriter?
Nadia Fall (NF): I met Suhayla El-Bushra at the National Theatre. Suhayla wrote an adaptation of Nikolai Erdman’s comedy “The Suicide, which I directed. And just from that play, a lot of people got in touch to say that we should both do a film together. We thought it would be a good idea.
At that time, there was a lot going on in the media around the real life young people that had made a similar journey, especially highlighting the young women from East London who were teenagers when they did it. It was all in the news and they were often portrayed as very troubled and terrible people. We just thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful to tell their story from their point of view?’
But to be honest, we avoided it for a long time. We are both British Muslims, and we just felt like we don’t want to do the same old stereotypical stories about radicalization. But in the end, we thought we had to kill the policeman in our head and forget trying to say the right thing at the right time. We just had to tell the story from the young people’s point of view. Because at the end of the day, for us, it’s a story about friendship and that kind of deep platonic love you have for your best friend, where you’d die for each other. Also, it’s about the teenage brain and how it is hard wired to take risks.
All of us did it as teenagers and some of us survived it just by the seat of our pants. Yes, of course there’s the politics and the real life stories, but ours was fictionalized. The film is really about young people and friendship.
I’m curious about you two, Ebada and Safiyya, got involved and to what extent you identified with your characters.
Ebada Hassan (EH): I was cast before Safiyya. I saw the casting call on social media, and they were looking for an East African girl who could play a 15-year-old. I thought, ‘I can do that.’ I had never acted before. At the time, I was in university studying something different. I did want to pursue acting, but never had the opportunity.
NF: I can’t believe this is her first acting role. She didn’t even do drama
That’s so surprising! You’re such a natural in this role.
EH: Thank you. I just sent in a self-tape because I thought, ‘I might as well, what do I have to lose?’ I managed to get the part after many auditions and workshops. It’s been lots of fun.
Safiyya Ingar (SI): But I think the personalities of our characters are kind of similar to who we are. You’re more of an introvert, and I’m more of an extrovert.
EH: [laughs] I mean, we definitely have friends who bring us out of our shell, but I’m quieter.
SI: And I’m not, I’m like fired up [laughs].
EH: We’re opposites, but we also bonded very quickly. I think initially in the chemistry test, we connected straight away.
SI: I wasn’t initially cast, and Ebada was going to play the part with someone else. But because of the circumstances, she had to drop out, and then Nadia got back in contact with my team. They were looking for a South Asian Muslim actor to play the part.
NF: I actually saw Safiyya in a play. She was brilliant in it and I remembered her.
SI: And then I got the script and I was like, “hell yeah let’s do this.” We had the chemistry read and it was good.
NF: I love that you call it a chemistry read. For me, it was a genuine audition, and I got you to do crazy things. When Safiyya was reading, Ebada and I looked at each other because we knew she was so good.
SI: And I was like, damn, she’s just bought it. [laughs]
EH: She was improvising, which is obviously a huge risk to do at an audition, but I could tell she was just going to bring her personality into it. She wasn’t playing it safe. I was going along with it, and it was so much fun.
I know this film is focused more on the friendship between the two girls, but I think you did a great job in exploring the complexities of the Muslim religion. There’s so much beauty to it, but like most religions, it has its extremists. How was it for you, Ebada and Safiyya, inhabiting the roles of these young Muslim girls?
SI: I grew up in East London’s secondary schools when all of the terrorist attacks were happening. It was all very much part of everything that was happening around me, like police being sent into our mosques and preventative programs being put into our schools about counterterrorism. It was just about profiling brown kids, and it was really, really tough. I lived through that and it was just normal, especially post -9 /11. Existing as a Muslim is just rough. We’re in the trenches out here, and everything is so far beyond our control.
There’s so many things we spend our time trying to explain to people about words being put out of context. I’m constantly
explaining to people what Ramadan is and what fasting is — really simple things that
other religions do, like the Christian and Jewish faith. But for some reason, when it’s Muslims, people are like, “I hate that you guys starve yourselves for a month.” I’m like, “oh my god, where you hearing this all from?” Then I realize that I already know. I have to be a kind of peace giver in response because there was so much weird stuff around our identity that we do not place in ourselves. Instead, we spend so much of our time
combating and it’s so exhausting.
I’m just lucky that I have this as an outlet. I can be the catalyst to be able to hopefully drive change through empathy, especially for these girls. I hope that we do that by presenting our characters as just two young, innocent kids. Because they are, big religious shit aside. They were just two little girls who didn’t really know which way was up and they saw a direction and went, “okay let’s go for it.” Because it’s relatable. Who doesn’t do that when they’re a kid? I think the only thing that sets them apart, and I don’t find it at all surprising, is when we’re people ask us these sort of questions. They believe these girls should have known what they were doing. And why? They were only 15 years old.
NF: That’s the dumb shit we do. Young people live in the present, they don’t think about consequences. It’s hard to pack in all of these ideologies into one film, like the other ideas of Islam, such as Whirling Dervishes, Sufism and the more mystical side. It’s such a huge religion that spans continents and races with Chinese Muslims, Arab Muslims, and Indian Muslims. There’s actually a lot of different types of religions in the Islam religion, but always reduced to one thing. So we thought, ‘okay, let’s grab the thing, and make it into our own. You could say it’s about radicalization, but let’s dupe you into thinking it’s about that.
-and then bring human faces to it and making it an authentic story. I love that.
My last question is kind of an extension of that. Even though this is not really a period piece, the story takes place about ten years ago, yet has a lot of universal themes that I feel everybody can latch on to today. What do you hope people see in your film?
EH: If I was to summarize it, I’d say childhood innocence. Genuinely, if that’s one thing that people are going to take away from this, it is that these girls were children. They made a mistake. They did not know what they were getting themselves into. I think people have this false pretense that when someone becomes radicalized, they did their research and went down this path with the full knowledge of what they were getting into. But they couldn’t have known. You couldn’t have even imagined.
SI: I feel like the biggest battle we’re going to face with this film is the cultural differences, mainly because it is a very British film, but also the time period itself. People forget that when social media started, it was just a bombardment of random stuff. We were all just excited to be a part of it because it was so new and exciting. I grew up with the inception of social media. I remember chalkboards in primary school and then all of a sudden, we’ve got tablets in their hands. There’s that element of, ‘remember when we were all on MySpace and Bevo and all those websites?’ We all have scary stories about how we were possibly groomed online by definitely older men. Every single girl that I know has a story about that. Because we all just acknowledge that it was a real whirlwind of different stuff. We were just happy to be able to connect with people in a way we never had before.
I think that’s also a fundamental part of this film. These girls ended up finding this group of people who made sense to them in a world that didn’t make sense at all. Then they go, “okay, cool, they seem like they know where it’s at, let’s go over there because what’s the worst that could happen?” Because the world wasn’t connected in the way it is right now. It was still really isolated .They couldn’t have just hopped online and gone on TikTok and see what life is like in Syria.
EH: What they were consuming was propaganda. People were thinking that it’s great on the other side.
NF: But it’s really hard because I’m not in the business of telling an audience what to think. Ultimately, that’s incredibly patronizing. I would like to think audiences are quite intelligent. Certainly we’re all emotionally intelligent in the sense that we know when something is real or not, you know? I hope you kind of feel it in your belly.
I just hope whatever you think politically or wherever you’ve been brought up, that this film triggers debate. We’re in a period where all these politicians are speaking for us as people. They don’t want us to communicate. They want to go, “you’re the baddie, and I’m the goodie, don’t speak to them because they’re different than you.” They try to make it tribal when we are all actually the same. If anything, I want the film to promote discussion, because no discussion is scary. Also, I said this last night at the premiere, that it’s important to remind people that all the children, no matter where they’re from, what language they speak, what clothes they wear, what God they worship, they are all our children.
