Wad­j­da

Imag­ine a world where no one dare speak and laugh­ter is pun­ished. A world where free­dom is out­lawed, peo­ple are prop­er­ty and devi­a­tion from the rules car­ries bru­tal and vio­lent con­se­quences. This is no fic­tion­al, futur­is­tic dystopia: this is the present day for a woman liv­ing in Sau­di Arabia.

The idea that a woman might deign to make a film in this pro­hib­i­tive and deeply patri­ar­chal domain remains at best laugh­able and at worst total­ly and utter­ly out of the ques­tion. Yet with the won­der­ful Wad­j­da, Haifaa Al- Man­sour has mirac­u­lous­ly achieved just that. Brave­ly ven­tur­ing into for­bid­den ter­ri­to­ry, Al-Man­sour even direct­ed the film via a walkie-talkie to avoid being seen giv­ing orders to men in public.

Al-Mansour’s brav­ery is mir­rored in the plucky young hero­ine at the heart of this sub­tle exam­i­na­tion of ingrained human rights abus­es. Ten-year-old Wad­j­da (Waad Mohammed) is a wheel­ing, deal­ing entre­pre­neur, weav­ing her way through a con­ser­v­a­tive and reg­i­ment­ed high school designed to shape its female atten­dants into the sec­ond-class cit­i­zens of the future. Nev­er resigned to her sealed fate, Wad­j­da sets about acquir­ing the bur­geon­ing object of her desire: a bike. With feigned enthu­si­asm but com­mit­ted ded­i­ca­tion she enters a com­pe­ti­tion to mem­o­rise the Koran in the hope of seiz­ing the cash prize need­ed to buy this trea­sured item, wor­ship­ping dai­ly as it taunts her from the shop window.

The bike acts as an explic­it metaphor for lib­er­a­tion and the quest for its acqui­si­tion soon becomes a frus­trat­ing anal­o­gy for the strug­gle for women’s auton­o­my in a state where their behav­iour and mobil­i­ty is strict­ly mon­i­tored. The film nev­er strug­gles under the strain of its weighty sub­ject mat­ter, deliv­er­ing an enjoy­able and heart­felt tale which com­bines ele­ments of exhil­a­rat­ing com­e­dy and tense dra­ma that nev­er detract from its brave­ly artic­u­lat­ed subtext.

Mohammed’s cen­tral per­for­mance is com­mend­able as the rebel­lious, angel-faced tomboy with a cheeky façade and a skewed moral com­pass: she presents a refresh­ing­ly opti­mistic view of youth in revolt. Wad­j­da nat­u­ral­ly employs some under­hand manip­u­la­tion tac­tics in her bid for glo­ry which in turn gen­er­ates many of the film’s stand­out com­e­dy moments.

The sub­ject of female oppres­sion in Sau­di Ara­bia is still con­sid­ered a top-rank­ing taboo, mak­ing this some­thing of an insou­ciant film­mak­ing mile­stone, not sim­ply in terms of its dis­sec­tion of female sta­tus and dis­crim­i­na­tion, but the coura­geous­ness of writer/​director Al- Man­sour, who oper­ates in the face of inces­sant adver­si­ty and tor­rents of hate mail. Al-Man­sour describes the film’s cen­tral premise as one of ​“hope, embrac­ing change and mov­ing ahead”, mes­sages pow­er­ful­ly appar­ent by the film’s grace­ful­ly poignant conclusion.