Last year, Saudi Arabia lifted its ban on female drivers. A new film follows several women as they take to the road – with surprising and moving results

About halfway through Saudi Women’s Driving School, airing on HBO this week, the film looks as though it could be heading into a commercial break. Scenes in the sprawling, dust-cloaked capital of Riyadh give way to a magnificent desert ringed by sandstone plateaus. A single black Hyundai streaks through, trailing sand like a comet. In a scene worthy of a car ad, a woman, Shahad al-Humaizi, drives through the desert, sunglasses coolly in place.

Making Waves: behind a fascinating documentary about movie sound Read more

Natural grandeur, woman at the wheel – it’s not an image often associated with Saudi Arabia and one only state-sanctioned since June 2018, when the country’s King Salman formally lifted a decades-long ban on female drivers. But Saudi Women’s Driving School seeks to uncover stories like al-Humaizi’s, which don’t fit neatly into quick news hits, as more and more women take to the road.

On a state level, the removal of the female driving ban seems like a rare progressive fluke for a country whose brazen flexes of state control have drawn international outrage; five weeks before the ban’s end, the film notes, at least 10 female activists who publicly called for the change were arrested and branded as traitors in the state press. Just months after the ban lifted, the brutal murder of the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in a consulate in Istanbul, which a UN report blames on the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, drew widespread condemnation, as has the country’s blockade on neighboring Yemen, spawning one of the worst humanitarian crises of the decade.

Still, as Saudi Women’s Driving School demonstrates, on a micro level, the end of the driving ban is no small event for numerous women in the country, offering new opportunities for employment, mobility and passion. “I felt that having only known about Saudi Arabia through a lot of western media reports,” director Erica Gornall told the Guardian, “I wanted to go there on the ground and meet these women we’d seen on the news.”

Gornall, who has contributed to and directed several documentary projects for BBC2, joined the team behind Saudi Women’s Driving School relatively late in the process, just weeks before they were due to depart for Riyadh. Producers Nick London and Fiona Stourton had secured a rare filming visa based on the narrow focus of their project, a process begun in the weeks after King Salman announced the ban’s end in fall 2017.

The crew arrived in Saudi Arabia in mid-October 2018, and filmed on and off for three months. The team was, for the most part, surprisingly left to their own devices, said Gornall, although “at the same time, there were other things that reminded you that film-making was very new, and a thing you have to be careful about.” For example, she accidentally caused a scene by filming alone outside a crowded cafe. “But overall, it was a lot easier to film in Saudi Arabia than I thought it would be.”

The central hub of filming was the titular Saudi Women’s Driving School in Riyadh, a looping maze of new drivers and instructors in white cars, and the gateway to certification for aspiring female drivers. Gornall and her crew followed several women at different levels of driving ability. For some, like Sarah Saleh, who works on an auto showroom floor but was not able to drive, a license offered freedom of mobility and the chance to actually drive a product she sells. For women like race-car driver Amjad Alamri and Uber driver al-Humaizi, the ban’s end translated into career opportunities.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sarah Saleh, the auto saleswoman who was unable to drive. Photograph: HBO

Alamri, introduced to Gornall through a Saudi member of her film crew, began learning to drive long before the ban’s end; now, she’s a striking presence on the racetrack, inspecting her car, willing herself not to get too distracted on the turns. “The ambition after having so many barriers for years and years and being told no this isn’t for you – she is one of those feminists who really is taking the bull by the horns,” said Gornall.

Meeting women such as Alamri and al-Humaizi was “quite surprising”, said Gornall. “There was quite a rebellious streak to some of the women we met.”

But that rebelliousness bumps into opposition beyond the high walls of the state. Keeping to the film’s small-scale focus, Saudi Women’s Driving School visits the issue of driving, and women’s rights at large, in individual conversations and family discussions. In one of the most striking scenes of the film, al-Humaizi picks up a random male passenger in her Uber who has never ridden with a female driver before. She broaches the topic of women’s rights casually but firmly, with a smile. Does he support the changes? she asks. He answers confidently yes, to a point; he’s not opposed to equality but afraid of what might happen beyond that since “women by nature are emotional”.

Al-Humaizi stares straight ahead, then drops him off at his destination. God bless, he says. “I really enjoyed your driving, which I’d been scared of.”

The man was one of several anonymous participants Gornall and her crew picked up on street corners to ride in al-Humaizi’s Uber or to discuss their thoughts on the driving ban – footage that was “the most frustrating bunch of interviews I’ve ever had to do in my career to date”, Gornall said.

“As a film-maker, you try not to personalize it because it’s not about me,” Gornall said of the Uber scenes in particular. “But it’s incredibly challenging not to because I’m still a woman.” The casual misogyny, stated confidently as simply a matter of course, “made me upset”, said Gornall, “not for me, but for the women like Shahad, like Amjad, who were probably the strongest women I’ve ever met in terms of their determination against everything that’s happened in the past”. To have people underestimate them, she said, was “really frustrating”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Race car driver Amjad Alamri. Photograph: HBO

The bald sexism in these conversations — one man, via voiceover, said he supported lifting the driving ban but would not let his wife drive because he didn’t want other people to see her – can be galling, but “I know those are conversations that are happening in the UK and the US every day,” said Gornall. “The difference is [in the US and UK], they would never say that to a woman’s face.”

Still, the rights of women in Saudi Arabia are significantly limited; the documentary notes that at the time of filming, men still maintained so-called guardianship rights over women, meaning they could not travel without a male relative’s permission. Guardianship was lifted in July 2019, though women must still seek permission for marriage.

Gornall said she was careful, however, not to underestimate the mettle of Saudi women. “The idea that they weren’t driving [before the ban] – they were,” she said. “And I found that quite amusing, but also quite refreshing.”

However, Gornall acknowledged, the reality is that breaking the rules in the autocratic country still often results in severe punishments. Loujain al-Hathloul, who drove before the ban’s end and is shown in the film calling for greater rights for women, is still in prison. The film posits that Saleh’s license, al-Humaizi’s conversations as an Uber driver and Alamri’s fearless presence on the track are all small steps of progress – achievements worth celebrating and perhaps indicative of a more liberated future for Saudi women. “I want to be optimistic for the future of the women I filmed in Saudi,” said Gornall. “But I think it’s hard to see how those seeds will blossom further without bigger changes.”