“If you set your mind to something, no one can stop you.”

‘Wadjda’, directed by Haifaa al-Mansour in 2012, is a Saudi Arabian drama depicting the life of an eleven year old year in Riyadh. The girl, Wadjda, played by Waad Mohammed, is headstrong and rebellious. She decides she want a bike so she can race the boys in the neighbourhood, but bikes are considered unsuitable for girls. Denied money by her mother, and determined to get her own way, she beings to save money she is earning selling music and jewellery. She enters a competition at school – the challenge being to recite part of the Quran with the prize being enough to allow her the bike, but finds the competition to be challenging. She also faces the conservative views of both her mother and the school, holding her back and denying her what she wants. It’s a ground-breaking film, both in what it depicts (oppression and conservatism in the heart of religious Saudi Arabia) and in the way it was made. The director, al-Mansour, was a woman who faced the same limitations and repression as her main character but managed to make a film using the real city as a location. The subversive nature of this film is reminiscent of Iranian films such as Jafar Panahi’s ‘The White Balloon’, but with the added challenges of the production.  al-Mansour’s, movie is clearly influenced by the neorealist films of De Sica such as ‘Bicycle Thieves’, or the Dardenne brothers’ ‘Rosetta’, but has the addition of a strand of comedy in the pleasingly headstrong character of Waad.

Would I recommend it? Yes – it’s an important movie with a humanist centre. Watch in a double bill with ‘The White Balloon’.