Wadjda

It's not the way these girls look or dress that makes them the wonders they are: it's their dreams and what they're willing to do to make them come true. It's their pursuit of possibility, their inventiveness as they figure out what to do with the time they have on this planet.

Yesterday just at dark, Sue biked across town to my neighborhood, and after dinner we strolled down my One Street to see the beautiful and deceptively simple film, Wadjda. Haifaa Al Mansour, the woman who directed this first film ever made entirely in Saudi Arabia, writes:

"I come from a small town in Saudi Arabia where there are many girls like Wadjda who have big dreams, strong characters and so much potential. These girls can, and will, reshape and redefine our nation."

Big dreams and strong characters. I like that. The same is true of girls in Portland, in any place.

Wadjda is rich in cultural information about Saudi women’s lives, and it celebrates the nerve and resourcefulness of a girl about the same age as this group I caught walking home from school today. It’s not a film about the oppression of women, it respects Islam, and it doesn’t whine. It’s a tender, joyful, honest depiction of life in a culture that many in the West don’t understand. I agree with Martindawe: thoroughly recommend.

And on another subject entirely, as the truth emerges about the aftermath of the storm in the Philippines, I am grateful to the survivors and photographers who are telling us the story, we who cannot conceive of such devastation. Unimaginable horror. The soul staggers.