Northern Iraq's first lingerie store not only sells bras but also acts as a hang out where women share stories. 'Ordinary women' tell their story to director Jacqueline van Vugt and talk about love, sex, shame and war.

The film was shot in the lingerie shop of the Dutch-Kurdish entrepreneur Shapol Majid; the first in northern Iraq. The store is located in Suleimaniyah, a city in the Kurdish Autonomous Region of Iraq. Women who have become alienated from their own bodies through oppression, war wounds and a conservative morality, here find sensuality again in the fitting rooms.

It appears that female sexuality in public is still too controversial for many Kurds. "A billboard of a woman in lingerie is not possible," say the owners of the mall,
yet the women we meet are remarkably open. They need to be among each other, too, away from the all-important family. The women expose themselves in several ways, and tell what they have experienced 'firsthand'; Rozhan talks about her hymen and the fear that it would be elastic, Shiaw about her forced marriage and Tara about her circumcision. At the same time, war and oppression are never far away, not even in the lingerie business, the women have so many scars on their souls...

Shapol Majid has started a sewing workshop next to the store. Here Nasrine and Medina work, two women from a Yezidi refugee camp. They recount their own experience during the recent attacks by ISIS. Their relatives are still missing.

We see women who have lost relatives, who experienced war and have lo live with trauma, women who are oppressed by men and by their own mothers. In the lingerie-shop we meet these women who are not allowed to show a bare leg. And yet they go on, and they have fun at the store.