General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Wadjda (وجدة)

Wadjda (وجدة) is a 2012 comedy-drama film directed by Haifaa Al Mansour, about a young girl in Riyadh who schemes to earn enough money to buy a green bicycle that Saudi custom says is not for girls. It was the first full-length feature film to be shot entirely in Saudi Arabia and the first feature directed anywhere by a Saudi woman¹. A Germany and Saudi Arabia co-production, it premiered at the Venice Film Festival on August 31, 2012 and went on to receive awards including at Venice and Dubai, along with a BAFTA nomination for Best Foreign Film².

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Haifaa Al Mansour, the first female filmmaker from Saudi Arabia³
Milestones	First feature shot entirely in Saudi Arabia; first feature directed by a Saudi woman¹
Production	Germany and Saudi Arabia, 2012; Razor Film Produktion GmbH; producers Roman Paul and Gerhard Meixner³
Runtime and language	98 minutes, in Arabic¹
Principal cast	Waad Mohammed (Wadjda), Reem Abdullah (mother), Abdullrahman Al Gohani (Abdullah), Ahd (Hussa), Sultan Al Assaf (father)¹
Premiere and honors	Venice, August 31, 2012; awards including at Venice and Dubai; BAFTA nomination for Best Foreign Film²
Oscar submission	Saudi Arabia's first submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar (86th Academy Awards); not nominated²

Spoilers

Story

Wadjda, a ten-year-old girl (some reviews describe her as eleven), lives with her parents in a suburb of Riyadh, the Saudi capital. Playful and practical despite her conservative surroundings, she regularly pushes against the limits placed on her³. After a quarrel with her friend and neighbor Abdullah, she sees a beautiful green bicycle for sale and resolves to buy it so she can race him, even though cycling is considered unsuitable for girls and her mother forbids it, fearing the social repercussions⁴^•³.

Her schemes to raise the money, selling charm bracelets and running errands for classmates, fall short of the roughly 800 riyal price, so she enters her school's Quran recitation competition, which carries a 1,000-riyal cash prize, although the bicycle matters to her far more than the recitation⁵. Around this central plot the film follows her mother, who is distracted by her husband's family pressure to take a second wife so he can have a male heir, and the school's strict headmistress, who tells students that "a woman's voice is her nakedness"³^•⁵. Critics noted that the film makes its points about Saudi gender restrictions with a light hand, showing women and girls enforcing many of the rules on each other rather than presenting simple villains⁵.

Production

Al Mansour, born in 1974 and regarded as the first female director in Saudi Arabia, studied comparative literature at the American University in Cairo and film at the University of Sydney⁶^•². She refined the screenplay at the Sundance Institute writer's lab and secured funding from Prince Alwaleed bin Talal's Rotana Studios, the German production company Razor Film, whose earlier credits included Paradise Now and Waltz with Bashir, and additional German backers and broadcasters².

Filming in Riyadh was shaped by the threat of the religious police; producer Gerhard Meixner said the crew would wrap and switch locations quickly whenever they were near². Because Al Mansour was not permitted to be seen in public with her male crew members, she directed the film's many street scenes via walkie-talkie from a production van equipped with a video monitor, a process that increased the rehearsal and planning time each scene required². Most of the cast, including Waad Mohammed, who was found a week before principal shooting began, were first-time non-professional actors; the exceptions were the television star Reem Abdullah and Ahd Kamel as the headmistress².

The creative team included cinematographer Lutz Reitemeier, editor Andreas Wodraschke, and composer Max Richter¹. Reviewers placed the film in a realist tradition, with the Independent Cinema Office comparing it to Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves and the heyday of Iranian cinema⁴.

Reception and significance

The film premiered in the Orizzonti section at Venice on August 31, 2012 and screened at Rotterdam and Tribeca in 2013¹^•². Its honors included Best Newcomer Film at Venice 2012, Best International Independent Film at the British Independent Film Awards 2013, the Norwegian Peace Film Award at the Tromsø Festival 2013, and a Best Film award at the Dubai International Film Festival, and it was nominated for a BAFTA for Best Foreign Film⁷^•². In France it sold more than 400,000 cinema tickets⁸.

Because Saudi Arabia had no cinemas, with movie theaters banned from 1983 to 2018, the film was not shown in its own country on release². It was nevertheless selected as Saudi Arabia's first-ever submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, at the 86th Academy Awards, though it was not nominated².

The film's timing intersected with social change in Saudi Arabia. In April 2013, seven months after the premiere, the country lifted its ban on women bicycling in certain parks when accompanied by a male relative as chaperone, and the country's first bike race for women took place in April 2018². Cinemas reopened in Saudi Arabia in 2018 after thirty-five years of closure⁸. Al Mansour herself framed the film as forward-looking rather than purely critical: "There are a lot of films coming from the Middle East that complain about the situation, and for me, it's done... The next step is to change it, and change on our personal level"².

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Coming-of-age films › Coming-of-age films released 2010 onward

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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