Aysha
2021 · 13m · Germany
Directed by Cengiz Akaygün
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, war
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
Ten-year-old Aysha, wearing a full-body veil, and her little sister are put to a religious test by a strict woman in a backyard in Afrin, Syria, and rebellious Aysha refuses the role imposed on her.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the veiled child to be a victim—Aysha flips that script by making her refusal the engine of the whole thing, and it's genuinely unsettling in a way that cheap provocations never are.
The film sits in uneasy conversation with a lineage of post-war coming-of-age cinema, but its treatment of religious authority and childhood agency feels formally restless, almost resistant to the gravitas such material typically commands.
That moment when Aysha's defiance shifts from internal resistance to visible action—the specific timing and scale of it, shot with such restraint—is the hinge that transforms what could've been a message film into something alive and unpredictable.