This shocking film follows the so-called Isis brides stuck in a refugee camp in Syria. Their stories are terrible – and their lack of remorse is palpable
You begin simply marvelling at the access. The writer and director Alba Sotorra Clua spent two years filming in the al-Roj refugee camp in north-eastern Syria to create her film about the so-called Isis brides – the women persuaded by the self-proclaimed caliphate’s propagandists to come to Syria and support their fellow Muslims by joining the terrorist group. Their various governments – Belgian, French, Dutch, German, British and more – are washing their hands of them. Now, it is left to the Kurdish people to dig deep into their already stretched emotional and physical resources and take care of them as best they can.
You soon move beyond that and are drawn into the detailed depiction The Return: Life After Isis (Sky Documentaries) provides of life in the Asayis-guarded camp for now more-or-less stateless women, who arrived in the country as potential jihadists. The film is built round lengthy face-to-face interviews with many of them – including, most pertinently for a UK audience, Shamima Begum. She became the centre of a media frenzy/tabloid witch-hunt/outbreak of legitimate public concern (delete according to taste) when she ran away from her east London home with two schoolfriends at the age of 15 to join Isis after becoming radicalised online. Four years later, she expressed a wish to return to Britain, but was – in a decision that appeared to go with public feeling but against international law and has essentially been upheld since – stripped of her citizenship.
