Quote:
Frustrated with the limits placed upon her because of her gender, a small-town Saudi doctor takes matters into her own hands and runs for local council, in this family drama from Haifaa Al-Mansour (Wadjda, Mary Shelley).

After her debut feature Wadjda (2012) broke new ground as the first-ever film shot entirely in Saudi Arabia — and the first made by a Saudi woman — director Haifaa Al-Mansour shifted to Hollywood with the TIFF-selected biopic Mary Shelley (2017) and Netflix’s Nappily Ever After (2018). Now, she returns to the kingdom with The Perfect Candidate, a tale of one woman’s quest to challenge not only the system but also herself.

Maryam (Mila Alzahrani, making her debut) works passionately as a doctor in a small-town clinic — though some men refuse her care because of her gender. Maryam has a musical father who, after the passing of her mother, kept the matriarch’s spirit alive in his support of his three girls. But when he goes off on tour, Maryam is unable to renew her travel permit — until very recently, Saudi women were not allowed to travel without the permission of a male guardian — and misses a medical conference. Frustrated by this as well as the attitudes she comes up against at the clinic, Maryam is convinced it’s time to take matters into her own hands: she’s going to run for local council.

What follows is a touching family drama, as Maryam, with her sisters’ help, tries to win over the hearts, but mainly the minds, of the men who think she has no place in the public sphere.

As with Wadjda, Al-Mansour explores the pressing issue of women’s rights through the microcosm of one character, showing that change may be slow to come, yet it can start with the smallest act of bravery.

The.Perfect.Candidate.2019.BDRip.576p.x264-FuFu.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 44 min
Size: 	2.95 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1024x432 
Aspect ratio:  	2.40:1
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	3 592 kb/s
BPP: 	0.338
Audio
#1:  	5.1ch AC-3 @ 448 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/3400B4DE739FC68/The.Perfect.Candidate.2019.BDRip.576p.x264-FuFu.mkv

Language(s):Arabic
Subtitles:english muxed

The post Haifaa Al-Mansour – Almurashahat almuthalia AKA The Perfect Candidate (2019) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Slant Magazine wrote:
Wadjda, a film about the oppression and long-imposed inferiority of women in Saudi Arabia, even begins with a downward-tilted, condescending gaze, offering an opening shot of school girls’ feet. One pair is notably different from the others, sporting purple-laced Chuck Taylors instead of the uniform-y patent-leather slip-ons. These, of course, are the feet of the 10-year-old title character (Waad Mohammed), whose rebellious nature is immediately, ham-handedly underlined as a rally cry for all Saudi women. Reluctant to sing in a choral-type lesson among her tuneful classmates, Wadjda is quiet and unengaged, to which an instructor reacts with, “What’s the matter, Wadjda? You don’t want us to hear your voice?” Cut to Wadjda inside her bedroom full of Western-pop-culture décor, listening to Grouplove’s “Tongue Tied.”

This is the kind of deliberate, standard-issue metaphor Wadjda deals in, and it relates to the film’s inherent contradictions regarding conformity. Before long, Wadjda is enrolled in a competition about the importance of exerting vocal dexterity, in the same school that wholly promotes its native society’s silencing of women. Meanwhile, Wadjda, a movie with the paramount purpose of counteracting said silencing, opts to fall in line with a markedly conformist—and markedly Hollywood—structure, thus effectively shooting its supposed objective in the foot.

That’s an exceptional shame, seeing as the film has the distinctions of being the first feature shot entirely within Saudi Arabia’s borders, and the first helmed by a female Saudi director. Its maker, Haifaa al-Mansour, spent five years securing financing and overseeing production in the capital of Riyadh, where she often had to direct via walkie-talkie while hiding in a van. You’d think such circumstances would have galvanized al-Mansour to make a more daring film, but instead, she’s made what largely feels like the Saudi equivalent of 1,000 stateside underdog tales.

Though she attends an all-girl school, Wadjda has a male friend her age, Abdullah (Abdullrahman Algohani), who teases her while riding his bike, and fosters a not-so-secret crush. Bent on beating Abdullah in a race, Wadjda pines for a bike of her own, specifically a green one gleaming in the front of a local shop. She can’t afford the bike, nor will her mother (Reem Abdullah) permit the purchase, but her school’s Qu’ran recital contest comes with a cash prize that—whaddaya know—will cover the bike’s cost.

To her credit, al-Mansour does present a variety of female experiences and generational echoes within this custom-driven world, where even the climate is oppressive (“Come tomorrow with your head covered, or I’ll reserve a place in the sun for you,” warns Wadjda’s headmistress, announcing a literal, scorching threat). The headmistress (Ahd Kamel) hypocritically copes with inequality in secret by bedding a man on the side, while Wadjda’s mother refuses to accept that Wadjda’s father (Sultan Al Assaf) is seeking a second wife who might bear him a son and heir. Moreover, though male influence constantly looms, al-Mansour predominantly sidelines her male characters, as if she’s half-attempting to evoke the no-boys-allowed tradition of The Women.

It’s likely and commendable that young girls (or boys) in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere will find Wadjda inspiring. But few others should expect much in the way of artful innovation, as Wadjda, with its climactic, scholastic contest, is more Bee Season than Bicycle Thieves. It doesn’t play like reality, but like boilerplate filmic fantasy, and its novel setting and inception struggles seem positioned as a beard—or veil, if you will—to mask its mediocrity. The argument will be made that al-Mansour tamed and diluted her film to make it more widely and universally accessible, but, again, by doing so, she’s defeated her own purposes. It’s not like a film shot stealthily in one’s own restrictive country can’t be made and disseminated without compromise. Just ask Jafar Panahi, whose staggeringly brilliant This Is Not a Film was composed on the sly, smuggled out in a cake, and is without a single saccharine note.

2.70GB | 1 h 37 min | 1022×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/F384F2E2817C4DA/Wadjda.2012.576p.BDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv

Language:Arabic
Subtitles:English, French

The post Haifaa Al-Mansour – Wadjda [+commentary] (2012) first appeared on Cinema of the World.