What a Girl and Her Bike Can Say About Women's Rights

'Wadjda" director Haifaa al-Mansour discuss making Saudi Arabia's first feature-length film.



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What sets Wadjda's story apart from others is that she lives in Saudi Arabia, where women aren't allowed to even drive a car. A girl riding a bike, though not outright illegal, is extremely taboo. But Wadjda isn't thinking about the social constraints she faces because of her sex and how they will become even more restrictive as she grows up. She just wants a bike, which makes the film playful, fun and funny, even when gently critiquing Saudi culture.

Abdullrahman Al Gohani and Waad Mohammed are directed by

"Wadjda" is also notable in that it is reportedly the first feature length movie filmed entirely in Saudi Arabia (It will also be the country's first Oscar entry). Making it even more remarkable, it was written and directed by a Saudi female filmmaker, Haifaa al-Mansour.

"I wanted to make something about my hometown where I grew up, my life," al-Mansour says.

Al-Mansour started the script for "Wadjda" as a masters student in film, work-shopped it at Sundance, and ultimately filmed it in a suburb of Riyadh, the Saudi capital.

"It was very important to me was to not offend people back home . I wanted to maintain my voice. I wanted to make a movie about freedom, about a girl who wants to ride a bicycle," she says. "I know that idea is very controversial back home. It's not like something they'll accept. But in the process of making the film, I wasn't trying to push it even more, or be so loud that when Saudis see it, they don't see themselves in it."

The character of Wadjda was inspired by al-Mansour's niece, and the film uses her quest for a bike as a vehicle to examine women's rights .


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Al-Mansour wanted to make the film as a coproduction between Saudi Arabia and a European country. "The Middle East is very closed to film outside the mainstream," she says. "For me it was really important to open untraditional markets for this film."

After five years and "maybe a million" of emails, al-Mansour found a German production company willing to take a chance on her film. Finding Saudi partners however proved even harder.


The film gets much of its complexities – and its darkness – from the other characters: Wadjda's mother, who must deal with a horrendous commute just to get to work every day; Wadjda's father, who loves his daughter and wife, but is considering a second marriage because his first hasn't given him a son; Wadjda's teachers, who waver from compassionate to cruel when instilling the "traditional" values their conservative society imposes on its women; and Wadjda's best friend, a boy who loves Wadjda so much he even lets her ride his bike.

"I feel it's not right to say all the women are the good ones and all the men are the bad ones. It is not like that. There are very bad women in Saudi—like everywhere else in the world," al-Mansour says. "And some men are not bad."
