Reviews | Girls Of The Sun by Eva Husson

Girls of the Sun (French: Les filles du soleil) is a 2018 French drama film directed by Eva Husson. It was selected to compete for the Palme d'Or at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival.

www.lesfillesdusoleil-lefilm.com/presse

Mavi Boncuk |
REVIEWS
'Girls Of The Sun': Cannes Review BY LEE MARSHALL 12 MAY 2018

A batallion of female Kurdish fighters take on ISIS in Eva Husson’s follow-up to ‘Bang Gang’

‘GIRLS OF THE SUN’

Dir/scr: Eva Husson. France/Belgium/Georgia. 2018. 115mins.

The feminist message is clear and sincere in Eva Husson’s ponderous women’s war movie, which focuses on a battalion of female Kurdish fighters in the front line of the fight against ISIS. A mid-budget mis-fire after the director’s promising indie debut, Bang Gang, Girls of the Sun seems more concerned with staging sisterly bonding sessions amidst the rubble than in developing what might have been an intriguing story – about how war can reshuffle social and gender inequality.

The director’s decision to shoot for universal values rather than distracting details gives the entire story a soft-focus feel

Husson’s surprisingly static drama has a big, theatrical look and high-volume orchestral soundtrack but is lacking in other departments – the story structure being the most problematic.

There’s a scene towards the end where we see the faces of an advance party of Kurdish fighters led by commander Bahar (Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani) and the war-toughened reporter embedded with them (Emmanuelle Bercot) poetically illuminated by fiery light from the air strikes that their US allies have launched to support their offensive. Any true soldier would have backed away from the windows in a still active battle zone where enemy snipers and suicide bombers are rife – but it makes for a great widescreen array. It’s one small example of the film’s tendency to overstate, to opt for the easy money shot, that undermines our faith in the authenticity of what we’re watching.

Bercot’s Mathilde is a recently-bereaved veteran French photoreporter who lost an eye while covering the battle of Homs, and a war correspondent partner in Libya, but is back for more in Northern Iraq where she has come to write a story about a Kurdish women’s unit. She’s assigned to the battalion under the command of Bahar, whose tragic, faraway look is soon explained by great lashings of backstory, introduced in clichéd flashback mode, that take us back to the abduction of this former lawyer by ISIS militants. Sold into sex slavery like thousands of other Kurdish women, she managed to escape and became a fighter to not only take revenge on her captors, but also to fight for “Women, Life, Liberty’” as the battle song of these ‘Girls of the Sun’ have it.

Husson seems to have decided at an early stage of writing the script that audiences are never going to grasp the difference between Kurdish groups like the PKK, the YPG and the Peshmerga, or the unique place of the non-Muslim Yazidi minority – victims of the Sinjar massacre of August 2014 that initiated the events recounted in the film – within Kurdish culture. Even the town the Kurdish forces are attacking is inexplicably given a name derived from the ancient history of the region, Corduene (it’s clear from the dates that appear onscreen at the beginning that Corduene stands in for the Yazidi town of Sinjar, retaken by the Kurds in November 2015).

Gritty locations and production design put some realism back into the mix, but the director’s decision to shoot for universal values rather than distracting details gives the entire story a soft-focus feel. Bercot and Farahani emote like the great actresses they are, but there’s little to their characters but tragic backstory. And although there are some lyrical moments in the soundtrack by American musician Morgan Kibby, who also scored Bang Gang, her music is randomly applied – the worst offender being a solo piano lilt that leeches all of the tension out of one of a key escape-from-ISIS scene.

Production companies: Maneki Films
International sales: Elle Driver, sales@elledriver.eu
Producer: Didar Domehri
Production design: David Bersanetti
Editing: Emilie Orsini
Cinematography: Mattias Troelstrup

Music: Morgan Kibby

Main cast: Golshifteh Farahani, Emmanuelle Bercot, Zubeyde Bulut, Maia Shamoevi, Evin Ahmadguli, Nia Mirianashvili, Mari Semidovi, Roza Mirzoiani, Zinaida Gasoiani, Sinama Alievi

Cannes Film Review: ‘Girls of the Sun’

Eva Husson directs a pedantically commonplace drama about a French journalist embedded with a female peshmerga unit as they free a town under ISIS control.
By Jay Weissberg

Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival (competition), May 12, 2018. Original title: Les filles du soleil.

Director: Eva Husson With: Golshifteh Farahani, Emmanuelle Bercot, Zübeyde Bulut, Maia Shamoevi, Evin Ahmadguli, Nia Mirianashvili, Mari Semidovi, Roza Mirzoiani, Zinaida Gasoiani, Sinama Alievi, Ahmet Zirek, Behi Djanati Ataï, Adik Bakoni, Tornike Alievi, Nuka Asatiani, Arabi Ghibeh. (Kurdish, French, English, Arabic dialogue)1 hour 55 minutes

At the end of Eva Husson’s “Girls of the Sun,” a female peshmerga fighter enjoins a French journalist: “Write the truth.” The problem, unrecognized by Husson, who also wrote this pedantically commonplace drama, is that there are multiple ways of telling the truth: One brings to life three-dimensional people who respond to based-on-fact situations in ways that reflect the messiness of being human. “Girls” could be used as a case study for the other type of truth telling, the kind that studies real events and then packages them for mass consumption in ways that, while mimicking the facts in their barest form, offer no insight nor any sense of believable character. However, as this is a femme-centric film, directed by a woman, about a group of women courageously fighting ISIS, it’s a shoo-in for international distribution.

Those expecting something along the lines of Husson’s debut feature “Bang Gang” will be surprised by its old-fashioned earnestness, and to be fair, it’s hard not to be intimidated by the burden of representing the extraordinary Kurdish female forces who’ve been such a crucial element in the fight against ISIS in Iraqi Kurdistan. For that reason, interested parties are better off checking out some of the documentaries, such as “Gulîstan, Land of Roses,” rather than this well-intentioned yet cliché-riddled lunge at the tear ducts.

Husson crams in as much exposition as possible in the opening scenes, using the hoary formula of a diary-like voiceover to get inside the head of traumatized French journalist Mathilde (Emmanuelle Bercot), sporting an eye patch thanks to wounds she received while reporting from Homs. She’s about to be embedded with a peshmerga unit in north-western Kurdistan (filming was done in Georgia), but courage has fled her soul and she questions her worthiness. Once off the transport plane, she’s introduced to Commander Zirek (Ahmet Zirek), arguing strategy with Bahar (Golshifteh Farahani), the impatient leader of the women’s unit. Bahar, a former lawyer, will of course get her way.

When Mathilde is informed that the unit is composed entirely of former ISIS captives, Bahar looks off to the side in pained contemplation, allowing the director to clumsily insert a flashback of her husband (Adik Bakoni) and son (Tornike Alievi) before ISIS invaded their home, followed by clouds moving across the sky — yes, it’s that kind of movie. More flashbacks ensure that no element of Bahar’s background is missed: One night she gets a call that ISIS is approaching her town, but it’s too late: The menfolk are murdered while the women and children are rounded up and then separated. Bahar’s sister Suzan (Nuka Asatiani) is raped (Bahar screams, “Take me!”), and then she herself is violated in what was a horrifically common real-life story.

Flash forward and Bahar has convinced Zirek to allow her to take the unit into a mined tunnel with a captured ISIS soldier in order to infiltrate the town and free children from the school where they’re being held. Following a classic pep talk to her fighters, we get another flashback to show how Bahar found the courage to become the Moses of her people, though Moses never delivered a baby — suffice it to say that not even Melanie Wilkes’ water broke at such an inopportune moment. Through it all, Mathilde is taking notes and photographs while struggling with her inner demons.


The script is the film’s biggest liability, stuffed with old chestnuts that would be more at home in a Hollywood adventure film from the 1950s. Mathilde and Bahar are assigned personalities according to types, reinforced by what others say about them (or in Mathilde’s case, her Script 101 monologues), while everyone else is blandly interchangeable. Husson even has the hubris to write the lyrics to her very own peshmerga song, translated into Kurdish and sung by the unit (why do that when the Kurdish music tradition is such an important part of the culture?). And isn’t it odd that the word “Yazidi” is never uttered, though its scattered throughout the press notes provided at Cannes? Clearly the director’s positive impressions from her research made her want to create something that would generate popular sympathy for the cause, but writing a glorified TV movie wasn’t the way to go.

Farahani and Bercot are fine actresses who can’t do anything with lines or situations so lacking in nuance. Even Mattias Troelstrup’s cinematography, one of the stronger points of “Bang Gang,” has a generic feel or worse, such as an incongruously elegant drone shot that circles round the unit as they try shooting at an ISIS escort, prettifying a deadly skirmish that’s further banalized by Morgan Kibby’s sweeping and sappy orchestrations. Sound design is one of the film’s most successful elements.


PRODUCTION: (France-Belgium) A Wild Bunch release (in France) of a Maneki Films in association with Elle Driver, Wild Bunch, Elle Driver, Arches Films, Gapbusters, 20 Steps Prods., RTBF, Bord Cadre Films production, in association with BackUp Media, Indéfilms 6, B Media 2014, Cinécap, Cinéart, with the participation of Canal Plus, OCS, Proximus, Casa Kafka Movie Pictures, Tax Shelter Empowered by Belfius, LEPL Enterprise Georgia. (International sales: Elle Driver, Paris.) Producer: Didar Domehri. Co-producers: Brahim Chioua, Adeline Fontan Tessaur, Etienne Comar, Joseph Rouschop, Vladimer Katcharava, Arlette Zylberberg, Jamal Zeinal Zade, Dan Wechsler.

CREW: Director, screenplay: Eva Husson. Camera (color, widescreen): Mattias Troelstrup. Editor: Emilie Orsini. Music: Morgan Kibby.


WITH: Golshifteh Farahani, Emmanuelle Bercot, Zübeyde Bulut, Maia Shamoevi, Evin Ahmadguli, Nia Mirianashvili, Mari Semidovi, Roza Mirzoiani, Zinaida Gasoiani, Sinama Alievi, Ahmet Zirek, Behi Djanati Ataï, Adik Bakoni, Tornike Alievi, Nuka Asatiani, Arabi Ghibeh. (Kurdish, French, English, Arabic dialogue)

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'Girls of the Sun' ('Les Filles du soleil'): Film Review | Cannes 2018  by Jordan Mintzer

A meaty all-female war movie served with an extra slice of cheese.  

French writer-director Eva Husson (‘Bang Gang (A Modern Love Story)’) unveiled her second feature, about Kurdish women fighters taking on the Islamic State, in competition at Cannes.
Pulling out the big guns to depict the tragic plight and battlefield heroics of Kurdish female soldiers who bravely took on the forces of ISIS, Girls of the Sun (Les Filles du soleil) is at once mildly harrowing and completely over-the-top, intermittently intense yet so unsubtle it winds up doing damage to its own worthy discourse.

Written and directed by Eva Husson — whose first, very sexy and ethereal feature Bang Gang (A Modern Love Story) is a far cry from the Hollywood-style machinery of this effort — the film works best when it shows star Golshifteh Farahani leading her all-female battalion through the heat of combat, worst when it indulges in narrative histrionics and a tear-jerking score worthy of a Walt Disney movie. Premiering in competition in Cannes, and preceded by a first ever women’s march on the red carpet, this timely yet heavy war flick should drum up interest for its femme-centric cast, crew and subject matter.

Based on true events — in this case the stories of Yazidi women who were kidnapped, raped, sold into slavery and then escaped to join the Kurdish army — the script (by Husson, with the collaboration of Jacques Akchoti) follows two characters who find themselves immersed in fierce skirmishes between the Kurds and Islamic extremists in November 2015. One of them, Mathilde (actor-director Emmanuelle Bercot), is an eye patch-wearing war reporter traumatized by the recent death of her husband in Libya. The other, Bahar (Farahani) is a local (the film never mentions the Yazidi people by name) whose life was upended when the Islamists invaded her city, summarily executed all the men in her family and then took her and her young son, Hemin (Tornike Alievi), prisoner.

Cutting between the present, where Bahar and her squadron prepare to take back their city and perhaps locate her little boy, and the past, where we follow the woman’s traumatic journey from lawyer and mother to Kalashnikov-wielding freedom fighter, the film kicks off in an extremely clunky manner with some eye-rolling expository dialogue. “What are you doing in this hell?” one woman asks Mathilde as she arrives in a hilly and rather picturesque part of northern Iraqi Kurdistan. “You’re the kings of Marxist-Feminist propaganda,” she quips, in what is meant to sound like international shoptalk but comes across as totally unnatural and almost laughable.

That tone will come back to haunt Girls of the Sun on more than one occasion, especially when composer Morgan Kibby’s thundering score chimes in to pound every single dramatic note into our heads from one scene to the next. A faux-poetic voiceover by Mathilde that both opens and ends the movie — the latter during half of the closing credits roll — doesn’t help matters, either.

What works slightly better is the focus on Bahar and her truly awful backstory, which includes kidnapping, rape, suicide (of her younger sister) and imprisonment at the hands of Islamists who seem to thrive off the utter degradation of women. The Iranian-born Farahani, performing here in Kurdish and French, is altogether convincing in scenes that show her character deeply suffering yet refusing to let down her guard. After she manages to help her fellow prisoners escape — in a sequence that stretches credulity at times — it’s easy to understand why Bahar then decides to pick up a gun and courageously lead a female squad of Kurds to fight the enemy face-to-face.

Husson never lets us forget that this is a story of sisterhood in peril, of women bravely risking their lives — several of Bahar’s soldiers are killed off over the course of the film — to rid their land of an evil menace that has enslaved both them and their children. The director even wrote the lyrics to a song (composed by Kibby) that the combatants sing to psyche themselves up: “It will be a new era/Of Women, Life, Liberty” they exclaim one day before the enemy suddenly appears at their doorstep and the fighting kicks into high gear.

Working with cinematographer Mattias Troelstrup (The Forest), Husson does a good job making the battle scenes both visceral and poetic, with smoke and other effects used to illustrate the fog of war that Bahar and Mathilde — who shadows the soldiers as a reporter but serves little dramatic purpose beyond providing a Western viewpoint — find themselves in. The combat scenes, which include a slew of pyrotechnics, occupy most of the final reel, leading to a finale that seems rather forced and phony, undercutting the more serious historical backdrop of the film.

It’s impressive to see a relatively new director like Husson trying to make an all-out guts-and-glory war flick a la Oliver Stone (his films Platoon and Salvador both come to mind here), although taking Hollywood movie tropes and applying them to the plight of the Yazidi could be considered a questionable use of her skills. On one hand, she’s shining a light on an important and terrifying story that made headlines a few years ago but has since been forgotten by many of us, and for that deserves some credit. On the other, she’s doing it with an overtly manipulative, rather cheesy approach to the genre that can play more like fantasy than reality, and so no matter how high the stakes are her film ultimately feels like a losing battle.



Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
Production company: Maneki Films
Cast: Golshifteh Farahani, Emmanuelle Bercot, Zubeyde Bulut, Maia Shamoevi, Tornike Alievi, Nuka Astiani
Director: Eva Husson
Screenwriter: Eva Husson, with the collaboration of Jacques Akchoti
Producer: Didar Domehri
Director of photography: Mattias Troelstrup
Editor: Emilie Orsini
Composer: Morgan Kibby
Casting director: Bahijja El Amrani
Sales: Elle Driver

In French, Kurdish, English, Arabic

115 minutes

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Girls of the Sun review – Kurdish female fighters film is naïve yet rousing
4 / 5 stars     
Eva Husson’s strong-arm approach works well for this powerful, partisan drama based on real-life women driven to fight Isis in 2014

Peter Bradshaw | Guardian

‘There is no irony here’ … Girls of the Sun

Eva Husson’s Girls of the Sun is a feminist war movie: impassioned, suspenseful, angry. For some, its robust action-film rhetoric will sit ill with contemporary issues and events — a rhetoric which might otherwise pass unnoticed in a conventionally peopled movie about, say, fighting for the allies in the second world war. Like that sort of film, Girls of the Sun is unsophisticated enough to be sure where right and wrong are placed, and incidentally to have faith in the efficacy of warzone journalism. We have all learned a shrugging cynicism about journalists who are “embedded”. Girls of the Sun begs to differ. For me it is heartfelt, forthright and muscular.

The movie is a fictional story, based on the true story of an all-female Kurdish combat unit fighting in 2014 to reclaim territory from the incel-fascists and rape-enthuasiasts of Isis. And this female unit is to discover that it is armed with a powerful and morale-boosting weapon unavailable to any other combatant: the Jihadis’ terrified conviction that being killed by a woman is a dishonour and humiliation that will send them straight to hell. For the first time in their lives, these women realise that men are afraid of them.

Golshifteh Farahani plays Bahar, a former professional lawyer and university graduate in northern Iraq, once captured with her husband and son when Isis warriors swarmed into town in their black pickups, accessorised with machine-guns. She was sold into domestic sex slavery, her husband beaten and killed and young son sent off to be trained as a child soldier. Meanwhile, Emmanuelle Bercot plays Mathilde, a French war reporter who has lost an eye in Homs and has now come to Iraq in what may seem a reckless further throw of the professional dice. This persona is evidently inspired by the real-life figure of the American foreign correspondent Marie Colvin who lost her eye in the Sri Lankan civil war in 2001 and affected an eye patch until her death in Homs in 2014. Mathilde comes out to the front, with her minders and fixers, and is naturally fascinated by what a great story the all-female unit is.

Her liaison officer provocatively raises the question of “propaganda” when they are all introduced — a question that nettles everyone. But they have little lasting interest in the issue. Mathilde, is after all, effectively to go into a combat zone with them without a weapon. And it is here, before the big push begins, that she meets Bahar, and it is in flashback that we learn the story of her capture and how she masterminded her escape with a hidden mobile phone.

Her male commander infuriates Bahar: a man who is content to wait for the American-led coalition to call in airstrikes, though Bahar is enough of a military person to see the ultimate importance of those. But she claims that the very threat of these airstrikes has caused alarm and despondency amidst the enemy, and the Kurds are in a position to make a bold strike right away and crucially to rescue civilian captives who will almost certainly be murdered en masse as Isis retreats. Reluctantly, the commander lets Bahar and her unit go ahead as commandos.


The scenes where Bahar makes her escape with other women (one pregnant) and the later scene in which the now careworn warrior Bahar leads a military sortie into a tunnel — these are straight-ahead action scenes, without much in the way of subtlety. But they are well-orchestrated and effective. There is no irony here. I found myself, weirdly, thinking of the revolutionary Women’s Battalion of Death in Sergei Eisenstein’s October — a battalion which is in fact satirised by Eisenstein. These women are not satirised, and they are not dramatically subject to that continued exposure to war which will eventually make any soldier, male or female, desensitised to the business of killing. The film halts with their provisional victory, and yes, it may seem naïve, but then there is naivety in believing there is no plausible way of showing good triumphing. Girls of the Sun is partisan and it wears its heart on its sleeve: a powerful, forceful story.

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Film français d’Eva Husson. Avec Golshifteh Farahani et Emmanuelle Bercot (1 h 55). Sortie en salle le 21 novembre.

Cannes 2018 : « Les Filles du soleil », dans les champs de mines de la fiction
Le deuxième long-métrage d’Eva Husson tente de concilier le récit romanesque et l’évocation des tragédies kurde et yézidie.

LE MONDE | Thomas Sotinel

SÉLECTION OFFICIELLE – EN COMPÉTITION

Est-ce donc si grave que les acteurs ne parlent pas la langue de leurs personnages, que le morceau d’histoire (au sens de ce que fait advenir l’humanité) qu’ils traversent soit seulement « inspiré » de ce qu’il s’est passé ? Après avoir vu Les Filles du soleil, on a tendance à répondre que oui, c’est grave, pour autant qu’un choix cinématographique puisse porter à conséquence. Que le recours à la fiction, quand on veut évoquer une tragédie qui n’est pas encore terminée, implique plus de devoirs que de droits.
Pour son deuxième long-métrage, après Bang Gang, chronique de la dérive érotique d’un groupe d’adolescents, Eva Husson a sauté à pied joint dans un brasier : la guerre qui a opposé l’organisation Etat islamique (EI) aux combattants kurdes en 2014 et 2015. Comme nombre de chroniqueurs de ce conflit, elle s’est attachée aux femmes qui ont pris les armes, dans des unités rattachées à diverses obédiences kurdes, et ont affronté les forces du « califat ». Mais celui-ci ne sera pas nommé, pas plus que les factions kurdes, un carton prévient que les noms des lieux, des formations politiques et militaires et le détail des événements ont été changés.

Emmanuelle Bercot et Golshifteh Farahani dans « Les Filles du soleil » d’Eva Husson, en compétition au 71e Festival de Cannes.

La complexité transnationale gommée

Ce qui affranchit Eva Husson, qui signe le scénario, de la tâche ardue de donner une idée claire de l’origine de ces unités féminines, de leur place dans le paysage kurde, dont la complexité transnationale est ici gommée. Car l’histoire des Filles du soleil est simple. Bahar (Golshifteh Farahani) commande une unité d’anciennes captives dans une région qui ressemble aux monts Sinjar, au nord de l’Irak, théâtre de la persécution des yézidis par l’Etat islamique.

Elle accueille dans ses rangs Mathilde (Emmanuelle Bercot), une journaliste française qui arrive sur le théâtre des opérations au moment où tous ses confrères le quittent. Mathilde a perdu un œil (comme la journaliste britannique Marie Colvin, tuée par l’armée gouvernementale syrienne à Homs en 2012) et a été évacuée sur une moto de Homs (comme la journaliste française Edith Bouvier, blessée lors du même bombardement). Elle est aussi veuve d’un journaliste tué en Libye, mère d’une petite fille qu’elle a laissée seule.

On sent bien que de cet amalgame, Eva Husson voudrait faire sortir un personnage de fiction, tout comme du mélange d’éléments des histoires yézidie et kurde qui fait l’histoire de la commandante Bahar, qui d’ailleurs s’exprime dans la variante iranienne de la langue kurde, alors que ses subordonnées lui répondent dans la forme irakienne.

Après tout, l’histoire du cinéma ne manque pas d’exemples glorieux qui ont adopté ce rapport plutôt lâche avec l’histoire. Casablanca reste un beau film antifasciste, même si les Marocains, les résistants et les expatriés américains se sont toujours amusés de sa parfaite invraisemblance. Mais Casablanca a été tourné par des Américains à un moment où ils ignoraient presque tout de la réalité atroce de ce qui se passait en Europe. N’importe quel spectateur ou spectatrice des Filles du soleil peut accéder aux éléments qui ont fait l’histoire des unités féminines kurdes, du martyre des femmes yézidies, des premiers mois de la campagne contre l’EI. Et cette connaissance, ou sa seule possibilité, rend difficile de voir ravalés au rang d’éléments malléables, des faits répertoriés, qui ont chacun leur sens précis.

C’est ainsi que l’invasion des « extrémistes » (c’est le nom que leur donne le film), le massacre des hommes, l’enlèvement des enfants, l’asservissement des femmes, seront découpés en flash-back, qui alternent avec le récit de la prise de la ville où Bahar fut capturée par les forces kurdes. La combattante est persuadée que dans une école tenue par les « extrémistes », son fils est endoctriné.

Les motivations des protagonistes relèvent donc des figures romanesques les plus élémentaires : l’une ne peut plus regarder sa fille en face, l’autre veut revoir son fils. C’est tout. Bahar a beau être avocate et polyglotte, rien de politique n’entrera dans son discours, avant tout affectif. Quant à Mathilde, la souffrance que lui occasionne son métier de reporter de guerre (qu’Emmanuelle Bercot rend plus que perceptible) rend incompréhensible son acharnement à l’exercer. S’il est une hypothèse qu’Eva Husson ne veut pas évoquer, c’est que certaines femmes puissent aimer la guerre, pour la raconter ou pour la faire, malgré Lee Miller ou Jeanne d’Arc.