Girls of the Sun – first look review

Raped. Sold. Tor­tured. Eva Husson’s urgent and unflinch­ing fem­i­nist war dra­ma states its aim in no uncer­tain terms: to open our eyes to the hor­rif­ic real­i­ty fac­ing mil­lions of women glob­al­ly today. Specif­i­cal­ly, Girls of the Son tells the inspir­ing sto­ry of a group of women who lay siege to a small Kur­dish town in order to reclaim it from the hands of extremists.

Shad­ow­ing the bat­tal­ion is a French pho­to­jour­nal­ist, played by Emmanuelle Bercot, who in her pre­vi­ous appear­ance at Cannes in 2015 received the Best Actress award for Mon Roi. A seri­ous con­tender for that award this time around is Gol­shifteh Fara­hani, who builds on her impres­sive turns in About Elly and Pater­son with a com­mand­ing cen­tral per­for­mance here.

As aspir­ing lawyer-turned-embat­tled squad leader Bahar, the Iran­ian actor is a bea­con of hope and light in a world of chaos and male rage. Though Husson’s script leaves some­thing to be desired – the dia­logue is at times over­ly earnest and a lit­tle stilt­ed – through her actions, her intel­lect and her resilience Bahar speaks for all those women whose voic­es have been silenced.

Husson has said that she was inspired to make the film after read­ing about real-life Kur­dish women in Syr­ia and Iraq, who were tak­en hostage by ISIS and sold as sex slaves. A pre-title sequence dis­claimer informs us that the char­ac­ters and events depict­ed in the film have been mod­i­fied to some extent (although Bercot’s Mathilde bears a strik­ing resem­blance to the Amer­i­can war reporter Marie Colvin – eye patch and all – who was killed in 2012 while cov­er­ing the siege of Homs in Syr­ia), yet impor­tant­ly Hus­son doesn’t spare us the griz­zly details of what women like Bahar have been forced to endure.

The tim­ing of this impas­sioned ode to female resis­tance and sur­vival feels right, espe­cial­ly on a night when 82 women from across the film indus­try assem­bled on the red car­pet to protest against the lack of female rep­re­sen­ta­tion in the offi­cial selec­tion across 71 edi­tions of the fes­ti­val (82 female direc­tors ver­sus 1,688 male since 1946). It’s a flawed work, but it may just end up scoop­ing the top prize at Cannes this year. There have been far less wor­thy recent Palme d’Or winners.