Writer and Director: Shahad Ameen
“The most important thing,” says Janna’s grandmother, “is knowing where you are and where you want to go.”
The film opens with a bus full of women driving through what looks like Snowdonia, including rain and sheep. It is in fact Ta’if, in the mountains of Saudi Arabia, and the women, completely veiled in black ,or in white showing only hands and faces , are on their way to Mecca. Everyone is praying except a young woman called Sara, who is listening to music through her headphones, until her grandmother, ’Sitti’, confiscates them. When the bus stops at the boundary, where everyone is meant to enter a state of spiritual purity, Sara exits to a state of liberty. Abandoning the Hajj ,her grandmother and younger sister Janna set off in search of her, improbably hitchhiking their way around the kingdom. For both women the journey is life changing, as much of a pilgrimage as the Hajj itself.
In fact, three generations of women are represented. It’s swiftly and efficiently revealed that Sitti has brought up the girls because her daughter, their mother, has died, officially of “a sickness,” but according to her sister Leila because “she bottled things up.” Leila has, disgracefully, left her husband and found work in a beauty salon. Surrounded by images of worldly glamour, she sympathises with Sara and seems to have facilitated the escape. Another aunt, the father’s sister, has stuck strictly to tradition and blames Sitti for encouraging Sara to go to university.
With heads and bodies completely swathed in white ihram garments, the highly expressive faces of both Khairia Nazmi as Sitti and Lamar Faden as Janna are especially noticeable, and contribute almost as much to the storytelling as the dialogue. Sitti’s default expression is grandly severe, but Nazmi has a wide range of nuance – not just disgust, suspicion, inscrutability, but occasionally, a gentle smile. The film is set in 2001, and Sitti is equipped with a solid Nokia. (There seems to be an excellent signal everywhere). However, she possesses ancient skills – can light a fire by striking a stone, and find her way by the stars. She also swears by a healing technique which shocks the elderly Bedouin shepherd at a wadi where they spend a night. “The world has changed,” he tells her. She is not a native Saudi, having made an arduous journey to the kingdom as a young girl -about Janna’s age. Some of her experiences, we eventually realise, are mirrored in Janna’s.
Faden movingly portrays Janna as a girl on the edge of womanhood, wavering between ice -cream- eating child and decisive young adult. Early on, appearing simultaneously defiant and mistakenly compassionate, she unties a camel, with immediate and dreadful consequences. During the two days of the story she learns to handle these supposedly temperamental animals, and , in a rather obvious parallel, her own emotions. The final scene is another encounter with a camel. Perhaps it is intentionally mysterious ; it seems awkwardly edited.
Ameen has made a previous film about mermaids, so it is not surprising that there are subtle hints of magic realism in Hijra. Partly it’s the dream like atmosphere created by the cinematography. Solid but empty buildings seem situated in the middle of nowhere -a disused railway station, an alarming prison-like structure. Some shots are almost monochromatic – there is an unforgettable image of Sitti, draped in white, standing in a vast white stone space. Arguably another magical element is the somewhat morally ambiguous character Ahmed, whom Sitti presses into service as a driver. He appears and reappears at fortuitous moments, once in a mysterious cloud of smoke . Grasping at first, and understandably disgruntled when Sitti accuses him publicly (and correctly) of selling fake holy water, he becomes a steadfast helper. He provides both pathos and comedy. When, in obedience to Sitti’s commands, they are lost at night on an unlit road, he gets out to pray privately “not for a different fate , but for kindness in this one.”
Women and their experience are at the heart of the film, but it is by no means antagonistic to men. There is a reference to the law about male escorts, and the girls’ authoritarian father, who never appears, the men encountered are generally helpful. When Janna occasionally finds herself alone with a man nothing bad happens .It’ s the matriarchy that causes trouble. In one universally relatable scene a woman berates Sitti for preventing her buying Ahmed’s fake holy water.
Uou can’t help noticing that they experience many of the rituals of Hajj in real life. ‘Hijra’ in fact means something like ‘migration’ – a life-changing journey. That surely is what pilgrimage is about.
Hijra is screening at the Muslim International Film Festival from 2-5 July.
