Exclusive: Nadia Fall, a noted artistic theatre director — she’s just moved from the Theatre Royal, Stratford East to run the mighty Young Vic — has directed her first feature film. It’s called Brides and is about two Muslim schoolgirls who leave their disruptive homes to travel via Turkey to Syria, where they join the Islamic state and offer themselves for marriage to men waging war.

It’s easy, and lazy, to jump to conclusions that the two girls — Muna and Doe, played extraordinarily well by Safiyya Ingar and Ebada Hassan, respectively — just kids really, are radicalized foot soldiers readying themselves to become terrorists, a bit like the real-life story of Shamima Begum, who left Britain in 2015, made her way to Syria and within two weeks was wed to a man who was later convicted of terrorism offenses.

They’re not that, Brides is not that.

“I can see on...