Waad Mohammed as Wadjda.
A film that reminds us what the movies are about, this child's-eye-view slice of life is a large miracle dressed up as a small one.
The first feature film directed by a Saudi woman, it's also the first made entirely in Saudi Arabia, a country where the manifold restrictions on
women include a ban on being seen in public without a male relative: exterior scenes were shot with al-Mansour in the back of a van, directing by walkie-talkie.
It seems hardly surprising, then, that her film is about a pre-teen girl beginning to bump up against the terrible destiny of her gender.
At 10, Wadjda (Mohammed) is the sweetest kind of rebel. Black basketball boots with purple laces peep from beneath her long black abaya, and when the teacher at her strictly religious school - where she is taught that men may not hear her laugh because it reveals her nakedness - tells her to get proper shoes, her response is to ink the white toes with a marker pen.
More problematically, she wants a bicycle so that she can beat her young male buddy, Abdullah (Al Gohani), in a race - an aspiration variously dismissed as irreligious, unladylike and gynaecologically perilous. Undaunted, the youngster pursues all sorts of venal scams to raise the money, including - to the astonishment of her teachers - entering a lucrative competition to memorise and recite passages from the Koran.
