A Kurdish hijab-wearing teen raised in Vienna discovers that cultural differences are a rocky two-way street in Kurdwin Ayub’s fiction debut Sonne. This spirited drama is immersed in Gen Z modes of communication that may feel a little extreme depending on your tolerance for elf filters. Highly attuned to the way teens freely expose their lives via social media, the film shrewdly uses snippets from TikTok and other platforms to add a self-reflexive layer to the protagonist’s increasingly muddied feelings about her identity and her friends’ unthinking cultural appropriation. Produced by Ulrich Seidl Filmproduktion and filmed with a natural grunge aesthetic that feels very Austrian indeed, Sonne is an updated take on the first generation immigrant struggle told by a woman filmmaker who knows what she’s talking about.
Ayub has a strong body of short films behind her as well as the personal documentary Paradise! Paradise! which explored her relationship to her Kurdish roots during a family visit to the homeland. In Sonne her visual style is more reminiscent of her shorts, with an added roughness designed to elide with the kinds of videos teens share with disposable rapidity. It opens with Yesmin (Melina Benli) in her bedroom horsing around with best friends Bella (Law Wallner) and Nati (Maya Wopienka), who’ve dressed themselves up in hijabs and chadors. Yesmin, who wears a hijab in public, puts hers on too and the three film themselves pseudo-seriously singing REM’s “Losing My Religion.”
Bella and Nati impulsively post it on YouTube without checking first with Yesmin, which is annoying on its own but made worse when her mom Awini (Awini Barwari, the director’s mother) berates her for allowing prayer garments to be used in such a profane manner. Dynamics in the family apartment are tense anyway: ill-tempered Awini has some chronic illness (or she uses it as an excuse) and is always hard on Yesmin, whereas dad Omar (Omar Ayub, the director’s father) is more lenient, arguing that Yesmin’s good marks at school mean she’s allowed to have fun on occasion. Her younger brother Kerim (Kerim Dogan) on the other hand is more coddled by Mom and criticized by Dad for bad grades and hanging with the wrong crowd.
Omar thinks the video is great and shares it with others in the Kurdish community, which makes the girls celebrities of sorts, asked to entertain at weddings where Bella and Nati are the only non-Kurds at the table. They love not just the attention but the sense of being part of another culture, one more “exotic” than their European heritage, but Yesmin’s not so comfortable as a performer and she’s uncertain how to feel about the way her friends casually toss off and on a hijab. After a wedding the three hang out on the street with Kaniwar (Kaniwar Youssef) and Midas (Ahmed Yousef) who are happy to fool around with Bella and Nati but hold fellow Kurd and Muslim Yesmin to a different criterion. Double standards, tensions at home and the usual teenage insecurities compound her self-questioning about what she wants and who she’s meant to be.
The script doesn’t seem quite sure what to do with Yesmin’s brother Kerim, and the dynamics at home are believable yet feel only partially drawn – is Omar’s desire to spend so much time with his daughter and her friends as icky as it appears, and why is Awini such a termagant? The surprise denouement at the end is also a questionable plot twist that plays into Western fears of inculcation. Notwithstanding these concerns, Ayub’s depiction of Yesmin’s turmoil is sharply drawn and very real, and the film’s approach to wearing a hijab is refreshingly neutral, ultimately a choice to be made by Yesmin alone that carries with it the old-fashioned woman’s prerogative: the right to change her mind.
Ayub’s preparatory work with the three young women is clearly evidenced by their physical ease, and their ability to improvise adds an extra layer of naturalness, especially important in depicting a generation so habituated to being filmed and having their image disseminated. Benli has the more nuanced role and she cannily embodies the teenager’s mix of sullenness and ebullience, in turns childish in fights with her brother, awkwardly self-conscious when forced into being the center of attention, and then on the cusp of adulthood when crisis strikes.
Cinematographer Enzo Brandner brings an appropriate feel of elastic tension to the visuals, imbuing observational shots with a sense of hesitant expectation that makes the TikTok videos feel even more explosive. Rapid-fire chats and videos with wacky filters, largely made by the cast themselves, reproduce Gen Z modes of communication and creativity, imparting an almost exhaustive energy that deliberately contrasts with the calmer though still unsettled handheld camerawork.
Director: Kurdwin Ayub
Screenplay: Kurdwin Ayub
Cast: Melina Benli, Law Wallner, Maya Wopienka, Awini Barwari, Omar Ayub, Kerim Dogan, Ada Karlbauer, Anthea Schranz, Marlene Hauser, Ahmad Yousef, Kaniwar Youssef.
Producers: Ulrich Seidl, Veronika Franz, Georg Aschauer
Cinematography: Enzo Brandner
Production design: Julia Libiseller
Costume design: Carola Pizzini
Editing: Roland Stöttinger
Sound: David Almeida-Ribeiro
Production company: Ulrich Seidl Filmproduktion (Austria)
World sales: Cercamon
Venue: Berlinale (Encounters)
In German, Kurdish
87 minutes
