Sonne (2022)

The main character is Yesmin, a young Kurdish woman of high-school age who grew up in Austria, is a good student, and wears a headscarf. Her family is from Iraq. Her mother is religious; she is shown praying in a white burqa. Yesmin has a younger brother, Kerim. She is close to her father, Omar; in one of the opening scenes, she shaves the hair off his body. At some point, her Austrian friends Bella and Natalie (Nata) start wearing headscarves and veils for fun, too. To everyone’s surprise, the music video the three of them make to R.E.M.’s song “Losing My Religion”—in which they also wear Yesmin’s mother’s prayer clothes—becomes a big hit in Austria’s Muslim Kurdish community. However, Nati and Bella uploaded it to YouTube without Yesmin’s consent. Kerim shows the video to their parents. While their father reads the comments approvingly and even posts a compliment himself, their mother is outraged: she feels it mocks Islam and her personally. Yesmin angrily retorts that her mother is overreacting. The three young women go on to perform at parties and concerts, including once at an Islamic center in front of Muslim women. Omar enjoys his daughter’s performances, mingles with young people there, dances, and takes great care with his appearance. Their mother accuses their father of not taking enough care of their son: Kerim does too little schoolwork and is always out of the house. With his friends, he slaughtered a pig in a park at night and posted the video. Yesmin tries to pull him away from the group, but fails. One night, the police even come to the house looking for Kerim because of the video, and their father willingly answers the officers’ questions. On a talk show, the young women emphasize that they are not trying to make fun of anything, but to inspire young girls and encourage them to avoid thinking in boxes. Yesmin grows increasingly quiet. She becomes estranged both from her culture and from Bella and Natalie, who are drawn to this unfamiliar world. At a party, they meet two young Kurdish patriots. Bella and Nati are fascinated by them, drink alcohol with them, and, contrary to what had been agreed, refuse to let Yesmin’s father drive them home; they stay, which makes Yesmin very sad. The young men demand greater respect for Islam and criticize the dancing in the successful video. Yesmin replies that you can dance while wearing a headscarf, too. Later, she warns Bella against hoping for a serious relationship with one of the young men: Kurds marry Kurdish women, she says, and Bella should leave him alone. Bella wants none of it, and the argument grows more heated until Yesmin gives her an ultimatum: him or me. The situation threatens to take a dangerous turn. Nati and Bella post videos featuring the Kurdish flag, and respond to Yesmin’s reminders about a performance they had agreed to do together at a Persian party considered conservative only once they are already backstage. Yesmin, who had been waiting for her friends outside, makes a snap decision to take off her headscarf and perform in a short dress. After the other two criticize her for this, an argument breaks out, making Yesmin’s growing distance from the views she had adopted from the others apparent. When Yesmin receives a call from Bella’s younger sister Lia, who says Bella and Nati have been missing since the previous day, Yesmin cannot help her. Later, Lia tells her that the two are in Iraq. Yesmin becomes increasingly apathetic. She comforts her mother, who tells her about the time she spent in Iraq, when she had to live in a bunker for eight years. Yesmin neglects school, her grades get worse, and, socially isolated, she spends her time with Bella’s younger sisters, who are rather simple-minded and imagine that Bella and Nati must now be living a wonderful life. They get drunk, and Yesmin has to vomit. Her parents come to pick her up.