I n Nadia Fall’s debut feature film, Brides, two teenage girls run away from Britain to join Islamic State in Syria, after being lured by social media posts promising freedom. If the story sounds familiar, it’s because it was inspired by real-life events.

Fall, the artistic director of the Young Vic , said: “I was doing a play with the writer Suhayla El-Bushra at the National [Theatre], and we were approached about making a film.

“At the time, the media was full of stories of young people that made that fateful journey to Syria, including Shamima Begum [the London teenager who travelled in secret to Syria to become an IS bride in 2015]. We noticed how those young women were so vilified. They were portrayed as monsters, and nobody was really seeing the experience from their point o

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