It’s not often that a film is less notable for its content than for its provenance, and for the gender of its director, but this is such a picture.
Wadjda is the first feature film to be made wholly in Saudi Arabia, and compounding that important breakthrough in such an insular and religious country, writer-director Haifaa Al Mansour is female.
Her story is simple but charming. Wadjda (Waad Mohammed) is a sparky ten-year-old who attends a highly conservative girls’ school in Riyadh. St Trinians, it ain’t.
Her heart is set on buying a particular green bicycle, so she can race her friend Abdullah, but in Saudi Arabia’s strictly patriarchal Islamic society, bikes are thought to endanger a girl’s virtue.
Hence the irony of Wadjda trying to raise the 800 riyals she needs by entering a school competition, with a cash prize for the child who can best recite verses of the Koran.
Initially, little Wadjda’s quest is opposed by her mother (Reem Abdullah), who has her own pet preoccupation; trying to stop her husband from taking a second wife.
Both mother and daughter are at odds with cultural traditions, and yet the film does not feel polemical, still less satirical.
