SONNE
Director - Kurdwin Ayub
n a moment of ordinary madness, three girlfriends decide to shoot a burqa music video. Yesmin is Kurdish and wears a headscarf, Bella describes herself as “half-Yugo(slavian)” and Nati “comes from Austria”. They get along like a house on fire in their Viennese “twerk bitch” dialect. Yasmin’s little brother – no saint himself – squeals on Yesmin to their parents. But who could have known that Yesmin’s cool dad would “like” their video and would start chauffeuring these “talented women” from one Muslim community festivity to another. The three soon become famous, but then their views begin to diverge: Bella and Nati find a surprising new cause in the shape of Kurdish patriotism; but, caught between the reality show of her own life and the many others in her smartphone, Yesmin starts to feel alienated from her culture, her religion, the chauvinists around her and, finally, even from her friends.
What is a “homeland”? This is the question that Kurdwin Ayub – who fled from Iraq to Austria in 1991 – posed unabashedly in direct cinema style in her celebrated feature-length documentary debut Paradies! Paradies!. How are opinions formed and how do ideologies prevail? Staying true to her fresh-faced girls’ perspective and her effusively introverted young heroines, she now shifts, fascinatingly, into fiction.
