02 Apr 2014
Director: Haifaa al Mansour
Saudi Arabia
2012
98 min
Wadjda is a 10-year-old girl living in a suburb of Riyadh. She is fun-loving, entrepreneurial and always pushing the boundaries of what she can get away with. After a fight with her friend Abdullah, a neighbourhood boy she shouldn’t be playing with, Wadjda sees a beautiful green bicycle for sale. She wants the bicycle desperately so that she can beat Abdullah in a race. Her mother, however, will not allow it, as she fears repercussions from a society that sees bicycles as dangerous to a girl’s virtue. Wadjda decides to try and raise the money herself. This film won the Cinema Award at the Venice Film Festival and is the first, from Saudi Arabia, to be directed by a woman.