SONNE

Kurdish Austrian Yesmin (Melina Benli) isn’t especially religious, but she wears a hijab in public. At home, she has no problem filming her best friends Bella (Law Wallner) and Nati (Maya Wopienka) twerking in her mother’s prayer garments for TikTok. When they suddenly go viral – with a rendition of REM’s Losing My Religion - Yesmin’s habitually disagreeable mom Awini (Awini Barwari) is aghast. By contrast, her father, Omar (Omar Ayub), proudly shows the clip to all his friends. Soon the girls are being asked to perform in costume at Kurdish parties, an exotic adventure for Yesmin’s friends but disquieting for Yesmin’s already shaky teenage sense of self. Drawing on her own life, Kurdwin Ayub uses the melange of traditional and immigrant cultures as background to a story about the pressures of a life lived on social media. An extraordinary coming-of-age story about being a young Muslim in Europe that will make you laugh, cry and sing.