Wadjda is a 10-year-old Saudi Arabian girl who badly wants a bike to race the little boy across the street. She’s sure she can win. Unfortunately little girls are not supposed to ride bikes in Riyadh for fear of harming their virginity. It’s a difficult world she lives in but she’s totally determined.
Waad Mohammed gives a lovely performance as Wadjda in a film that in the West would be regarded primarily as a children’s story. Not very important, perhaps, except for the fact that it is the first feature ever to be made exclusively in Saudi and, what’s more, was made by a woman. Haifaa Al Mansour, who wrote as well as directed the film, was actually breaking some rules in doing so, since women are not supposed to command location work and she had to direct surreptitiously from a caravan for the outside scenes.
But, like little Wadjda herself, she clearly won’t take no for an answer, and the result is a very decent effort at telling an innocent-looking tale and putting a few digs in by the way.
Wadjda wins out in the end by triumphing in a school competition about the Koran even though her principal refuses to give her the prize money because she will use it to buy the bike. It will go, she says, to the Palestinians instead. But mother (Reem Abdullah), parting from her husband because she can’t give him a son, finds the money herself.
A simply made film, perhaps, but a brave one too. Did you know, for instance, that women shouldn’t speak in the street since their voices might reveal their nakedness?
