Feeling beaten down and obliterated by the blitzkrieg of summer movies? Well, just remember it’s just a couple of months left and we’re back to movies that don’t involve toys, brands and franchises. And one you should definitely put on your radar is Haifaa Al-Mansour‘s “Wadjda.” In a country where rights for women are still staggeringly archaic, it’s the first feature film made by a female filmmaker, and of course it had to be shot on the sly. But perhaps most of all, trivia aside, it’s just a damn good movie already landing on our 2013 The Best Films Of The Year…So Far list. Well, here’s a peek at what it’s all about.
The first trailer for the movie has landed, and it certainly looks like a potent charmer. The film tells the tale of Wadjda (Waad Mohammed), a rebellious 12-year-old girl who enters a Koran-recitation competition at school in order to win enough money to ride a bike. Simple enough, but in the background, her mother struggles to keep her marriage together, while the film itself doesn’t shy away from the situation in Saudi Arabia itself. But as we wrote in our review of the film out of the London Film Festival last year, the movie is blessed with a “clarity of storytelling” and delivers with “humor, emotion and smarts” in a movie that’s “something close to a miracle.”
“Wadjda” opens in the U.K. on July 19th and Sony Pictures Classics will bring it stateside this year, though no date has been set. Watch below.