The Perfect Candidate

Haifaa Al Mansour’s 2012 debut, ‘Wajda’ was notable for two reasons: It was both the first feature film made entirely in Saudi Arabia and the first fiction feature by a Saudi woman. Her follow-up continues to hew to her feminist principles, this time through the story of a young female doctor (Mila Alzahrani) who, more or less accidentally, finds herself running for office in the municipal elections. Seen as a hopeless cause at first, her campaign—to her and everyone else’s surprise—begins to gather momentum…

‘Al Mansour’s new film offers a frequently compelling glimpse of how workaday people are negotiating such radical systemic change… This is nothing if not a movie of its time, and it sings—sometimes literally—whenever it hones in on the unique struggle through which Saudi Arabian women might seize upon this historic moment… The result is a movie as brave and humble as its heroine, one that gently threads the needle between a realistic today and a better tomorrow.’—David Ehrlich, IndieWire