‘Hijra’ review: Family bonds are tested when a teenage girl vanishes in accomplished Saudi drama

Dir/scr: Shahad Ameen. Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Egypt, UK. 2025. 105 mins.

A pilgrimage to Mecca for 12-year-old Janna (Lamar Faden) and her severe, intractable grandmother Sitti (Khairiah Nathmy) is abruptly diverted when Janna’s 18-year-old sister Sara vanishes en route. Janna and her grandmother embark on an increasingly urgent journey, traversing Saudi Arabia to reach the far-flung border regions in the hope of intercepting Sara before the girls’ father learns of her disappearance. 

Confident and handsomely-shot

Some fairly blunt symbolism and an inconclusive ending notwithstanding, this is an accomplished and ambitious picture from Shahad Ameen that is distinctive for its predominantly female-led story, its focus on the country’s cultural diversity and striking use of the inhospitable Saudi landscape. 

The film marks a return to Venice (where it plays in Spotlight) for writer and director Shahad Ameen: her well-regarded sci-fi fantasy debut feature, Scales, premiered there in 2019, where it picked up the first of several prizes (it also took home gongs from Carthage, Singapore and Sydney Science Fiction Film Festival). Scales went on to be the Saudi official submission to the Best International Feature Film category of the 2021 Academy Awards. A confident and handsomely-shot picture, Hijra should, at the very least, match Scales’ healthy festival run.

From the outset, it’s clear that Ameen has an eye for striking compositions. Crammed into a minibus with fellow devotees (all women, dressed either in severe black or purest white), Janna is bored. Her grandmother draws the window curtain emphatically, but there’s a chink through which Janna can still see the world outside. Ameen creates a frame within the frame, giving us a sense of stolen glimpses of something forbidden. And of course, anything forbidden feels all the more exciting. 

Janna, baby-faced and naïve, is too young to rebel against her family. Sara, however, has already pushed back against the authority of her elders. When she vanishes, the first suspicion is that she has contacted her aunt, who, since she left her husband and took a job as a hairdresser, is regarded as something of a family scandal. There’s a boyfriend too, a relationship that was torpedoed by her family but which Sara hasn’t given up on. 

The pair broker a lift with Ahmed, a charming chancer who sells what he claims is Zamzam holy water to pilgrims. When Sitti sternly points out that she saw him filling his bottles from a roadside tap, their arrangement is terminated and grandmother and granddaughter are left by the road to haul the luggage by hand. The wide open Saudi horizons have rarely looked so intimidatingly vast and empty as they do with a small child and a frail old woman plodding across them.

Like Tawfik Alzaidi’s 2023 melodrama Norah, the film was partly shot in the spectacular AlUla region. The savage drama of the mountain and desert backdrop emphasises the vulnerability of Janna and Sitti. But it also brings them together, with Sitti sharing her wisdom on star navigation and fire-making.

An incident with a camel reunites the pair with Ahmed, and delivers the picture’s clunkiest metaphor. Janna releases the furious animal from its hobble, whereupon it makes a break for freedom and is promptly mowed down by a car. Escape comes at a cost, clearly. And just in case we hadn’t made the link with Sara, Janna mentions her sister pointedly at the end of the scene. 

More successfully explored are the themes of migration and the rich cultural mix of Saudi Arabia. Sitti is not Saudi by birth, but arrived in the country with her father on a pilgrimage and stayed on after his death. Of, we assume, Pakistani origin (he speaks Urdu), Ahmed was born in Saudi Arabia, but like his father before him, he doesn’t have citizenship and needs the backing of a sponsor in order to stay. His precarious status mirrors that of Sitti, and other women, whose quiet strength and resilience provide the spine of the story.