Slideshow
INSHALLAH A BOY
Opens Friday, January 12
DIRECTED BY AMJAD AL-RASHEED
The sudden death of her husband leaves Nawal, a young Arab woman and her daughter without rights or property under Islamic law—and at the mercy of male relatives. Both her own brother and brother-in-law at first show sympathy. But soon it’s clear that any whiff of assertion—I paid for half this house; I will keep my job; That’s my daughter and I will raise her as I see fit—is met with the absolute entitlement of patriarchy. Amjad Al-Rasheed’s gripping, taut debut immerses us in the tangled impossibilities for a woman who simply wants to keep her home and protect her daughter, without a husband or male heir to legitimize her. Her acts of resistance (including necessary deception) enmesh multiple players in a complex web of risk and hope—reminiscent of Asghar Farhadi’s masterpiece A SEPARATION—as we root and fear for her at every turn. The first film from Jordan ever selected for the Cannes Film Festival.
2023 113 MIN. JORDAN GREENWICH ENTERTAINMENT
IN ARABIC WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES
Reviews
“Terrifically tense. Exciting, galvanizing. A gripping social drama about systemic oppression that morphs into a masterful thriller. Al Rasheed’s precision-tooled movie is a social-realist drama rendered as an escape thriller where the labyrinth that Nawal must navigate is the Jordanian social order itself, a massive bureaucratic, patriarchal maze designed to ensure that any woman trying to evade its clutches will batter herself to exhaustion sooner or later against one of its deviously placed dead ends”
– Jessica Kiang, Variety
“With last year’s female-led uprisings against the ‘morality police’ in Iran, and the slowly growing liberalization of gender roles in Saudi Arabia, a new global focus on and solidarity towards women’s rights in Arab countries are emerging. This is the precise context that Amjad Al Rasheed’s first feature, INSHALLAH A BOY will be received… The film’s screenplay is appropriately co-written by two female writers, Rula Nasser and Delphine Agut…a top-to-bottom accounting of a repressive society laden with class antagonism.”
– David Katz, Cineuropa