15/09/2022 - VENICE 2022: Sérgio Tréfaut’s short, sharp film follows a female inductee of Daesh, as she awaits her own trial after her husband’s execution

If you thought prosperous countries raised their drawbridges far too harshly in response to the migrant crisis of the past decade, you can imagine their severe reaction to those who left Europe to join Islamic State and their potential wish to be resettled after the militant group’s sound defeat by a coalition of Iraqi and international forces. In the UK media as this issue came to light, much coverage was focused on British woman Shamima Begum, a teenage ISIL recruit, and the process by which the UK Court of Appeal permitted her to return home so she could contest the revoking of her citizenship, after which the country’s Supreme Court ruled unanimously against her. Public opinion on this matter was split, testifying to the strange, disconnected limbo state these individuals find themselves in, and the dispute on how exactly how much punishment or even forgiveness is needed.

This is the fascinating discourse around which experienced Brazilian-Portuguese documentarian Sérgio Tréfaut has set his latest feature, The Bride [+see also:
trailer
film profile], which was one of the last to premiere in the Orizzonti section at this year’s Venice Film Festival. Tréfaut has been making docs throughout his entire career (whilst also co-founding the DocLisboa festival), alternating them with the occasional fiction film, all of which have been based on historical or political material. And so The Bride, which runs at a scant 81 minutes, appropriately feels like a perfect docu-realist hybrid, boasting verité-style lensing of a skin-tightening immediacy, whilst also showcasing a sharp narrative throughline with not a moment’s meandering. Yet Tréfaut’s lack of judgement towards his main protagonist will be a limitation for some viewers, despite him certainly not showing empathy either.

Tréfaut’s focus here is on European inductees who joined ISIL; the lack of detail he proffers about his characters – ie, whether they were groomed or captured, and the violence likely committed – maybe fudges the issue slightly to help boost the audience’s potential sympathy. Newcomer Joana Bernardo plays Barbara, a young Portuguese woman who took on the name Umm once she and her French husband Pierre joined them in Mosul; Pierre was a chef in his previous life, and in one of the film’s many quick snatches of dialogue (it’s definitely more concerned with mood and imagery than with exposition), we learn this was his chief responsibility. Yet he is still executed in front of a firing range in one of the film’s early sequences; Umm doesn’t shed a tear, her response ambiguous and suggestive, but not opaque, in a canny screenwriting decision from the filmmaker.

To lightly invoke another religion, what we then see amounts to a “stations of the cross” progression for Umm. Her own judicial process and resettling in Baghdad is initiated, coupled with her continuing to parent her two sons, the sprightly Basil and toddler Mohamed, who were both born within the organisation, whilst nursing the pregnancy of another child. Pierre’s mother, played by Almodóvar favourite Lola Dueñas, jets in to collect her son’s remains; it is a small, telling vignette, with her body language and facial expression oddly neutral, rather than anything denoting despair. Umm’s father is quite similar in his reactions once he is able to visit her in a Baghdad prison meeting area. This film is a depiction of purgatory on terrestrial ground, and it tells us of this by showing, and not overtly lecturing.

The Bride is a Portuguese production staged by FAUX. Its world sales are handled by Alfama Films.