Wadjda: contexts and key sequences — Eduqas GCSE Film Studies C670
Eduqas GCSE Film Studies · C670
Wadjda: contexts and key sequences
Wadjda
What you need to know
Wadjda (Haifaa al-Mansour, 2012): ten-year-old Wadjda, in Riyadh, wants a green bicycle so that she can race her friend Abdullah, although girls are not expected to ride; she enters her school's Qur'an recitation competition to win the money, while her mother fears her father will take a second wife.
The first feature film shot entirely in Saudi Arabia, and the first by a Saudi woman director, who directed some street scenes from inside a van.
The restrictions on women and girls in Saudi Arabia at the time, such as the ban on driving.
Key sequences to know in detail: the opening at school, Wadjda seeing the bicycle, and the competition and the ending.
Cinematography and mise-en-scène: realist location filming and natural light, Wadjda's trainers and the green bicycle as symbols, and walls and windows that enclose women.
Editing and sound: unshowy editing, music on cassette, and quiet non-diegetic music that aligns us with Wadjda.
The few short lines of dialogue that matter most in these sequences, a few words each.
Short answers of the kind the first parts of the Section B question ask for: naming and describing a character, and explaining how a technique introduces them.
How to answer each part: the marks, and what the short identify and explain parts need as well as the extended answer, since naming a technique instead of a specific example from the film loses marks there. Practice questions to try, each headed 'Practice question' with its marks.
Quote only short lines of dialogue you're sure of, a few words at a time, and base every point on what happens in the finished film.
