‘Norah’ Review: A Striking Debut About Artistic Repression in ’90s Saudi Arabia
variety.comSiddhant Adlakha The first Saudi Arabian film ever selected for Cannes, the tender rural drama “Norah” is writer-director Tawfik Alzaidi‘s first feature film.
The story of a schoolteacher tasked with introducing literacy to an isolated village and his unlikely relationship with a precocious young girl, the movie suffers from a few early-career filmmaking tics, which prevent all its pieces from all neatly fitting together.
However, it’s also underscored by the kind of optimism and poetry about art that one often finds in novice works from directors destined to make more polished and accomplished films (if perhaps more cynical ones).
Alzaidi has that potential in spades, as “Norah” is a self-reflexive testament to the deep and profound need for artistic expression.
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