By Colleen Barry
Haifaa
Al Mansour has the distinction of being the first person to ever film a
movie in Saudi Arabia, never mind that she's a woman.
Al
Mansour's "Wadjda," which premiered this week out of competition at the
Venice Film Festival, is about a 10-year-old girl who dreams of having a
bicycle so she can race a neighborhood boy. But the dream is just a
little too subversive for a deeply conservative Muslim society where
women live segregated existences and girls around Wadjda's age are
expected to begin fully covering their faces when in public.
"I
feel so proud honestly to have shot the first film ever to be shot
inside Saudi Arabia," Al Mansour told The Associated Press. "It was an
extremely difficult experience, but still it's very rewarding and it
says something about the country — that the country of Saudi Arabia is
opening up, and there is a place for arts to grow, and there is a place
for women."
Despite having support within the Saudi royal family,
Al Mansour said she had to cope with limits present within society. For
example, severe restrictions on the mingling of men and women created
challenges in directing male actors in outdoor scenes, she said.
"I had to stay in a van and talk through a telephone sometimes or through the producer," she told a news conference.
The movie offers a rare and perhaps even unprecedented look into Saudi daily life.
Wadjda
lives alone with her mother, played by Reem Abdullah, and they are
visited only sometimes by her father. Devoted as he appears in person,
he is seeking a second wife to have a son, a source of stress for
Wadjda's mother.
Wadjda is as unfazed by the family drama as her
mother is distracted by it. The girl instead focuses on how she can get
enough money — 800 Saudi riyals, or $213 — to buy a green bicycle from a
nearby store, despite being repeatedly told that girls do not ride
bikes.
She charms the shopkeeper into putting it on hold for her,
while selling homemade bracelets and extorting small sums for favors to
raise the cash. Then, a school announcement that a Quran-reading
contest will have a prize of 1000 riyals suddenly awakens a modicum of
devotion in an otherwise uninterested girl.
Many of the scenes at
school emphasize the universals of growing up. Children gossip about
their teachers, tease each other and hide minor transgressions. The
girls listen to music and wear high-top sneakers, which peek out from
under their robes.
But Al Mansour also elegantly underlines the
unique plight of girls when a classmate of Wadjda's pulls out
photographs of her own wedding from her Quran during religion class. The
teacher smiles, simply asks the groom's age — 20 — and kindly tells the
girl that photos are not allowed in school.
Al Mansour sought
producers from outside the region, and chose a German production
company, Razor Studios, that had worked on Palestinian director Hany Abu
Assad's "Paradise Now" and Israeli director Ari Folman's "Waltz with
Bashir," both of which won Golden Globes for best foreign film.
But
while she walked along with the 12-year-old star Waad Mohammed on the
red carpet in Venice on Friday, there won't be any gala openings in
Riyadh because there are no movie theaters there or anywhere in the Arab
country. The film will, instead, be distributed by DVD and shown on
Saudi TV, said co-producer Fahad Al Sukait of Saudi Prince Waleed Bin
Talal's production company, Rotana Studios.
Al Mansour, who has
made three short films and a documentary previously, said her work in
the media had made her a "polarizing" figure in Saudi Arabia, and that
she had received death threats.
"But I never take that
personally," she told AP. "I know that they think that I threaten their
values, but I always try to be respectful because I want to engage them
in a dialogue rather than fight with them."
Al Mansour said the
fact that she ultimately was able to direct a film in her own country
was due to changes that are happening in the society there.
"There
is an opportunity now for women to believe in themselves, to push and
believe in their dreams," she said. "Society will put pressure on women
to stay at home. But women must stick together and fight for what they
want to achieve. "
A
lot of cities in the United States are broke and in debt, but Harrisburg,
Pennsylvania, has the dubious distinction of having the most debt per
capita of any U.S. city. The city's 50,000 residents collectively owe
$1.5 billion. That's a whopping $30,000 per person.
The
United States have the Strategic
Petroleum Reserve. China has the Strategic
Pork Reserve. And Canada? Apparently it has its own strategic maple
syrup reserve and it's been hit by sticky-fingered thieves in what is
probably the sweetest heist of all time:
Humans
are not the only animal that mourn their dead, but this is quite surprising:
when a Western Scrub Jay bird encounters a dead bird, it will call out
to others to stop foraging and, well, for lack of better words, attend
a bird funeral.
