Dir: Shahad Ameen | Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Egypt, United Kingdom – 2025 – 115’
The desert makes a beguiling backdrop to this sophomore road movie from breakout writer/director Shahad Ameen (Scales). Hijra offers insight into the complex relationship between three Saudi women travelling together to Mecca through unknown territory in remote dunes of Saudi Arabia.
12-year old Janna and her sister Sarah,18, are heading to the holy site as part of their Hajj pilgrimage under the watchful gaze of with their taciturn grandmother Sitta. But before the journey ends Sarah will disappear into thin air, her whereabouts shrouded in mystery, while Janna and Sitta will experience a testing spiritual and emotional trial in the hostile surroundings that will more than more than prepare them for the rigours of the Hajj.
With its female centric storyline and exotic settings Hijra makes for a refreshing twist on a concept thriller where men are firmly in the background but nonetheless crucial to the plot line: Male-dominated societies such as Saudi Arabia have traditionally thrown women into conflict as they compete for attention and a place in sun, and this has very much formed their view of life and the dynamic between them. The women are both rivals and accomplices and forced into the outside world on a treacherous journey they will discover much more about each other than they have experienced behind the idiosyncratic ‘closed doors’ of Saudi society in this intriguing drama impressively filmed on the wide screen and in close-up by the award-winning Chilean cinematographer M I Litton-Menz.
Shot across nine Saudi locations including AlUla, Bani Malik, Taif, Jeddah, Madinah, Tayma, Tabuk, NEOM and Duba, capturing the country’s vast geographical and cultural diversity. With Hijra, Ameen crafts an intergenerational portrait of women whose personal and emotional journeys echo broader themes of identity, history and belonging @MeredithTaylor
VENICE SPOTLIGHT | WORLD PREMIERE : Thursday 28th of August at 21:05