This post was co-written with Laysa Esmee, a Saudi Arabian lawyer.
Country: Saudi Arabia
Director: Haifaa al-Mansour
Time: 1 hour and 38 minutes
Where Can I Get It: Amazon ($3.99 to rent)
What It Evokes: Coming of age, female empowerment in patriarchal societies, generational splits
Wadjda, the first feature film shot entirely in Saudi Arabia, preceded the country’s first public movie theater by six years. Since the film’s release, Saudi society has undergone a significant social transformation, particularly with regard to women’s legal rights. Reforms have included alterations to the country’s male guardianship system, which has enabled women over the age of 21 to obtain passports, more easily file for divorce, and travel outside the country without male permission (2019); major reductions to the religious police’s power to enforce various social and sartorial codes, including the public wearing of the hijab (2016, 2018); the liberalization of workplace laws that have broadened the professional roles accessible to Saudi women (2020-2021); and, perhaps most famously, the legalization of female driving (2018). At the same time, these sociocultural shifts have (quite strategically) coincided with extensive political clampdowns, intrusive online surveillance, and the arrest and continued detention of various figures critical of the Saudi regime, from Wahhabi clerics to pro-democracy advocates.
Indeed, much has happened since 2012 when Haifaa al-Mansour, the first female Saudi to direct a feature length film, shot Wadjda under a series of constraints and unfavorable conditions. (To cite only one example, while shooting outdoor scenes, al-Mansour communicated with actors remotely using walkie-talkies from inside a van.) Nonetheless, her work anticipates many of the social changes the country has witnessed since its release.
Wadjda centers on a 10-year-old girl born to working class parents in the suburbs of Riyadh. After seeing her friend, Abdullah, cycle around various construction sites, Wadjda attempts (and fails) to persuade her mother to buy her a bike. She soon begins to undertake various (rather crafty) fundraising schemes at school in order to generate the funds herself. She first sells mixtapes and hand-made bracelets (featuring local football teams’ colors), before embarking upon a brief love letter delivery service through which she helps older girls at school (surreptitiously) communicate with their crushes. Her persistent desire for a bicycle simultaneously emerges an act of rebellion and naivety. She remains a troublemaker in the best sense. The seeming impossibility of buying a bike, on the seemingly obvious grounds that girls don’t ride bikes, appears to her absurd. In turn, sheer force of will allows her to begin to transcend the severe social codes that continue to trap adults around her.
In order to continue raising money, Wadjda decides to enroll in a Quran recital and interpretation competition at school in the hopes of winning a cash prize. She buys a religious video game (think Jeopardy! for Islam) to help her memorize relevant information—her father, who puts more stock in social mores than his daughter, tends to play first person shooter games on their family console by contrast. Much of the film’s drama centers on Wadjda’s preparation for the competition, as well as the ways in which her newfound “motivation” and “interest” in religion garner support from her (very much deceived) teachers. In this way, Al-Mansour offers a depiction of religion instrumentalized for personal gain, itself predicated on the cunning warping of belief and its attendant economic benefits.
In addition, Wadjda is a film about family. As an only child, Wadjda receives care and attention from her parents, while living within an evolving family configuration that reinforces traditional Saudi values. Her mother, a schoolteacher, often gets antagonized by the driver in charge of conveying her and her colleagues to their school—women could not drive in Saudi Arabia at the time of filming. This conflict encompasses two marginalized populations: migrant workers, who often endure extremely difficult employment conditions and who made up a large share of the country’s drivers prior to the 2018 reform, and Saudi women. Implicit within this dynamic remains a hierarchy whereby independent car operators, even from within their quite unprivileged positions, have significant power over female movement and, by extension, their ability to maintain continued employment. In turn, Wadjda’s bicycle emerges a metaphor for forms of spatial freedom absent male oversight.
In contrast to Wadjda’s mother, Wadjda’s father comes home only periodically from his distant worksite. In some sense, this allows Wadjda the space to forge an independent identity, while also underscoring the domestic as a predominantly female (private) space that gives way to different behavioral and sartorial codes. Throughout the film, the relations between Wadjda’s father and mother become increasingly strained, in large measure due to externally generated social and familial pressure concerning the absence of a son, an issue which continually threatens to result in Wadjda’s father contracting a second marriage. (Polygamy remains legal in Saudi Arabia.)
Within these confines, Wadjda’s independence brooks various religious traditions and cultural conventions, her continual acts of resistance subtly challenging and upsetting social expectations. In one choice scene, she appends a sticky note with her name onto a family tree featuring only the names of male relatives—the implication being that if her father could see her like a son, their family wouldn’t fracture. Further, Wadjda’s acts of resistance possess a public aspect. She refuses to wear her abaya (a women’s outdoor dress) and shoes in the “proper” manner at school. As Wadjda charts her own path forward throughout the film, her mother’s life becomes more difficult. In contrast to Wadjda’s success, her mother ends the movie surreptitiously smoking a cigarette and watching her husband’s second wedding—her own (very constrained) form of independence has come at the cost of losing a family. In this way, the film explores generational differences across women, while examining the many constraints that continue to limit forms of female freedom and expression.
Throughout Wadjda, al-Mansour underscores the complexity of life under intensely (and explicitly) patriarchal systems, employing a simple central plot that leverages marginal details to score quietly piercing political points. Perhaps more importantly, the film highlights the many contradictions that naturally exist within Saudi orthodoxies. That a woman could direct a full-length feature inside a country in which the film could not be publicly shown only underscores how women exert influence and power in various ways through acts of resistance and subversion that take advantage of inherent tensions within the country.
In light of recent changes and reforms within Saudi Arabia, decades-long traditional norms (themselves once politically sponsored by the regime) have not vanished, but instead transformed. Women can now drive and direct movies openly, even if both legal and social equality remains a distant prospect. Yet, as Wadjda makes imminently clear, these political and social developments have not solely emerged through top-down political directives geared towards basic forms of “female empowerment,” but instead have been negotiated in response to continued forms of female pressure and power that have long been central Saudi society.
- co-written with Laysa Esmee
Go Down The Rabbit Hole With:
Haifaa al-Mansour — The Perfect Candidate (2019)