"Wadjda"
Screening on Wednesday, March 5th 2014
Directed by Haifaa Al-Mansour
• Year: 2012 • Country: Saudi Arabia, Germany
• Running time: 98 min. • Classification: (PG)
• Watch a clip here
It is one of the first feature films shot entirely in Saudi Arabia and is the first feature-length film made by a female Saudi director. It has won numerous awards at film festivals around the world. *
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Summary:
"Wadjda is a 10-year-old girl living in a suburb of Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia. Although she lives in a conservative world, Wadjda is fun loving, entrepreneurial and always pushing the boundaries of what she can get away with. After a fight with her friend Abdullah, a neighborhood 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. But Wadjda's mother won't allow it, fearing repercussions from a society that sees bicycles as dangerous to a girl's virtue. So Wadjda decides to try and raise the money herself. " – IMDB.com |
Comments:
"This beguiling German-Saudi co-production turns upon an image that has been a cinematic metaphor for freedom, self-empowerment and lyrical liberation from Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou through Ford's The Quiet Man to Truffaut's Jules et Jim – a man or woman on a bicycle. The story is an admirable necklace on which to string facts, anecdotes and insights that illuminate in a good-natured way the lives of women in an unthinking, patriarchal, totalitarian society." – The Guardian. * |
Screening on February 5th 2014, Wednesday
Starting time 7:45pm at Leytonstone Library
Church Lane, E11 1HG, London. See map
Entrance £5 (£4 all concessions)
Check disabled access options availabe here.
* Note: If the main gates are closed (usually after 8pm) then entrance to the library will be through the disabled access door, which is located a few metres away on the left of the main gates.
