Sérgio Tréfaut's new film, The Bride, will compete in Orizzonti at the 79th Venice International Film Festival (August 31 - September 10). 

The film is expected to make a lasting impression, as its subject is bold and its treatment as sensitive as it is intelligent. It tells the (fictional) story of a European teenager who ran away from home to marry a Daesh fighter. She became a bride of the Jihad. Three years later, her life has dramaticallychanged. She lives in an Iraqi prison camp. She now has two children to care of and is pregnant again. She is a 20 years old widow and soon will be put on trial in the Iraqi courts. What have the experience of war and brainwashing done to her?

About the genesis of this extraordinary project, Sérgio Tréfaut says: "I was in Iraq for the first time in 2012, just after the US army left the country. A bloody civil war was taking place. Bombs were exploding everywhere. Thousands of people were dying. At that time, I was planning a documentary about how the American state theory that free media and free electionswould lead Iraq to a democratic and peaceful country was pure hypocrisy. I had the opportunity to travel between Mosul and Baghdad, and also to the South and Kurdistan. My documentary project collapsed with the rise of ISIS and the occupation of Mosul. The surprisingly high number of western Europeans who joined Daesh as foreign fighters led me to making this fiction film."