Transgressing Boundaries despite the Barriers: Arab Women in Four Recent Films

Wadjda. Haifaa Al Mansour, director (Saudi Arabia/Germany, 2012)

Nesma’s Birds. Najwan Ali and Medoo Ali, directors (Iraq/United Kingdom/Netherlands, 2013)

Om Amira. Naji Ismail, director (Egypt, 2013)

My Sense of Modesty ( Où je mets ma pudeur).Sébastien Bailly, director (France, 2013)

In May 2014 the University of North Texas presented its second annual Arab Film Festival Texas, a three-day event that brings together filmmakers and audiences at one of the region’s most popular art house cinemas. This year the festival’s curator and founder, the filmmaker and professor Tania Khalaf, included a variety of films that engaged with Arab women’s contemporary lives. I have selected four of the eighteen screened films for this review; all of them address the impacts of cultural, social, and political forces on girls’ and women’s lives, albeit in varying ways. Furthermore, each film is an emotionally engaging, well-crafted, and thought-provoking study of specific female lives in diverse Arab contexts.

Of the four films under review, Wadjdahas received the most international attention to date. Noteworthy for being the first movie ever filmed entirely in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, as well as the first full-length Saudi feature by a female director, Wadjdatells the story of a spirited girl on the cusp of puberty. While her mother struggles to undermine her father’s attempts to marry a second wife, Wadjda becomes obsessed with owning a bicycle, with which she hopes to defeat a neighbor boy in a race through the streets of their suburban Riyadh environment. In many ways Wadjdais a coming-of-age story that follows the tropes of that Hollywood genre, complete with the quest to possess a magical object that signifies the freedom of adulthood. The young girl invests tremendous power in the bike, viewing it as a ticket to personal freedom in a stifling, unsettled world.

Despite the Hollywood trope, the film avoids sentimentality. The harsh glare of the desert sun is a potent symbol of the continual surveillance women and girls experience in the kingdom, and the brutal reality of Wadjda’s pending pubescence—and its associated social restrictions—is juxtaposed to her indefatigable cunning to obtain the object of her desire. As her parents’ marriage falls apart, Wadjda’s schemes become more elaborate; despite the audience’s misgivings about whether she can achieve her lofty goals, she never loses faith in herself. Moreover, the theme of female competition permeates the film. On the one hand, Wadjda joins an actual Quranic recitation competition in an effort to raise money for her bicycle. On the other, her mother is emotionally racked by insecurities stemming from her husband’s decision to replace her with another woman who might produce a male heir; the reproductive game of patriarchal privilege is a competition she cannot win. Both story lines pit women and girls against each other, creating anxiety for the viewer. However, it is in overcoming this tension that mother and daughter are brought together in solidarity against their patriarchal society in the film. Ultimately an optimistic yet bittersweet film, Wadjdapresents its characters as diverse and multidimensional, all the while bringing up many issues for further exploration regarding women’s roles in Saudi Arabia.

Nesma’s Birdsis another film that wrestles with the complex emotions of a young girl moving from childhood into young adulthood. This elegant eight-minute film emerged from a workshop for young Iraqi filmmakers (sponsored by Human Film) as one of a series collectively known as the Iraqi 35mm Workshop Short Films. All of them feature themes of childhood and star Baghdadi children, some of whom live in an orphanage featured in the full-length documentary In My Mother’s Arms(dir. Mohamed Al-Daradji and Atia Al-Daradji, 2011), screened at the Arab Film Festival Texas as well. A standout of the workshop collection, Nesma’s Birdsmakes a...