Alessandra Bautze – 2026 Feature Screenplay Finalist
Hijrah Girls
Four years after leaving London to join the Islamic State as a "jihadi bride," a young woman returns home and fights to regain custody of her young son.
Alessandra Bautze is a screenwriter and Assistant Professor of Screenwriting at Georgia State University. She holds an M.F.A. in Screenwriting from The University of Texas at Austin, as well as a B.A. in The Writing Seminars and Film & Media Studies from Johns Hopkins. Her work embraces a socially-conscious, realist approach to narrative. Her screenplay RACING THE WOLF GOD won Best Screenplay at the 2021 Anchorage International Film Festival and the revision of the screenplay was a finalist for the 2025 Athena List. She has received residencies from the Nanjing International Writers’ Residency Program, the Storyknife Writers Residency Program (Homer, Alaska), the Mountain Words Writer-in-Residence Program (Crested Butte, Colorado), and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts (Nebraska City, Nebraska). She was named the Tangerine Entertainment Fellow for Stowe Story Labs’ 2023 Narrative Lab. She believes in the power of language to connect communities.
In 2015, three teenage girls left their homes in East London to join the Islamic State as “jihadi brides.” The case made international headlines. But the girls were not alone; approximately 550 women and girls from Western countries travelled to join the Islamic State. In 2019, the only surviving member of the so-called “Bethnal Green trio”, Shamima Begum, surfaced in a detention camp in northeastern Syria. She has since been stripped of her British citizenship and denied re-entry to the United Kingdom. But after years of resisting, the U.K. is now quietly repatriating some so-called “jihadi brides.” Alessandra Bautze wanted to ask the question, “What would happen if someone like Shamima Begum came back to the U.K.?” How would a young woman navigate returning to her country of origin after living with an extremist group? Are such individuals a danger to society? Are they at risk of further radicalization? Or are they simply misunderstood young people who were groomed? HIJRAH GIRLS raises these questions while centering the relationship of two girls who are both reckoning with their pasts while trying to move forward into the future.
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