BERLIN: One of France’s most high-profile directors, Rachid Bouchareb, has turned his camera on the appeal of terror to a generation of young Europeans, in a picture screening at this week’s Berlin film festival.

“The Road to Istanbul” tells the story of Elisabeth, a mother in Belgium whose 20-year-old daughter Elodie runs away from home to join fighters from the Daesh group in Syria. “I found my way,” Elodie, played by Pauline Burlet, says into the camera.

Elisabeth thinks that Elodie is at a friend’s house to study, only to learn that she has gone to Cyprus bound for Turkey, from where she will cross the border into Syria, joined by Kader, a young man she says she loves.

“It’s like she’s hit by a strong uppercut,” the actress who plays Elisabeth, Astrid Whettnall, told reporters, explaining the impact of Elodie’s sudden transformation.

Thousands of young European Muslims and converts have traveled to Syria and Iraq.

Belgium is the European country that has produced the most Daesh terrorists relative to its population size, with some 500 believed to have gone to fight in Syria.

Bouchareb, a Franco-Algerian filmmaker best known for the groundbreaking 2006 drama “Days of Glory” (Indigenes) about north Africans serving in the French army during World War II, said he had sought to closely examine a woman “completely shattered” by what happens to her family.

He worked closely with prominent Algerian author Yasmina Khadra on the screenplay and met with parents who had lost children to radicalism.

Bouchareb’s 2009 “London River” offered a dramatic account of radical conversion in the context of the 7/7 jihadist public transport bombings in London four years before.