Give Me the Backstory: Get to Know Nadia Fall, the Director of Brides

By Lucy Spicer

One of the most exciting things about the Sundance Film Festival is having a front-row seat for the bright future of independent filmmaking. While we can learn a lot about the filmmakers from the 2025 Sundance Film Festival through the art that these storytellers share with us, there's always more we can learn about them as people. We decided to get to the bottom of those artistic wells with our ongoing series: Give Me the Backstory!

I do think all storytelling is about evoking the act of empathy, says filmmaker Nadia Fall. I really do think of empathy as a muscle we all need to exercise to feel more connected to each other and ultimately less alone. In Brides, Fall's feature directorial debut, teenage Doe (Ebada Hassan) and Muna (Safiyya Ingar) set out on a journey from England to Syria in search of community and belonging - things they are desperately missing back home, where troubled family life, sexism, and Islamophobia have left the best friends feeling isolated.

Fall's film, which premiered in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival, is a friendship-focused road movie that invites audiences to empathize with its adolescent protagonists rather than judging them for having been steered toward extremism. Even as we take in flashbacks of unhappy girlhood and attempt to tamp down our nerves about this trip's outcome, we also see Doe and Muna just being teenagers, playing games and eating junk food and navigating various travel snafus.

I wanted to tell this [story] so that the audience could recognize these girls - that they could be your niece, sister, daughter, best friend, and not just the radicalized' other out there somewhere, says Fall. I also hope it survives as a tender study of teenage friendship, reminiscent of those deep platonic love stories of adolescence where we would die for our best friends. I hope it serves as an allegory, asking what happens to young people when they are othered and don't feel like they belong.

Read on to learn more about Brides and its director, including Fall's approach to portraying youth and the real-life events that inspired her debut feature.

LINK:	https://www.sundance.org/blogs/give-me-the-backstory-get-to-know-nadia...
	See more stories from sundance

More from Sundance Institute