‘Saudi Women’s Driving School’ documents the continued fight for women’s rights in Saudi Arabia where women finally won the right to drive in 2017.
In 2018, King Salman lifted a long-standing ban that prohibited women from driving. This ban gained international attention for making Saudi Arabia the only country in the world where women were forbidden to drive. However, since the 90s, Saudi women activists have been passionately fighting for the right to drive and other freedoms denied to them because of their gender. Many women have posted videos on social media of themselves driving as a form of protest. “We are ignorant and illiterate when it comes to driving. You’ll find a woman with a Ph.D., a professor at a college, and she doesn’t know how to drive. We want change in this country,” said Manal al-Sharif in an online video, before she was imprisoned in 2011. Manal al-Sharif was just one of the many women who sacrificed their personal freedom to fight for change in their country.
The strength and determination of these activists finally prevailed when the kingdom announced the end of the driving ban in 2017 and officially lifted the ban in 2018. However, Eman al-Nafjan, Loujain al-Hathloul, Aziza al-Yousef, and a number of other women who were previously arrested and released years ago, were rearrested five weeks before the ban lifted and labeled as traitors against the Saudi Arabian monarch. Even after the ban was lifted, these women still remain imprisoned. “This is an absolute monarchy that does not want to give credit to anybody apart from itself when it comes to social, economic, and political change,” says Professor Madawl al-Rasheed, author of “A History of Saudi Arabia”
Prior to this ban, foreign filmmakers who wanted to document the lives of Saudi women were prohibited from entering Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, out of fear of bad PR for the kingdom. However, since the ban has been lifted and a women’s driving school has been opened in Riyadh, filmmakers were finally let into the kingdom to document how being able to drive has profoundly changed the lives of Saudi women.
Saudi Women’s Driving School is the biggest driving school is the world, with 700 instructors and 250 cars. “I was one of the first people at the school when it opened. When I think that I couldn’t drive and that now I’m a driving instructor and that I can drive…I feel it’s an accomplishment, to be honest,” says Amal al-Jaber, an instructor at the school. People outside Saudi Arabia may not understand why the right to drive was so important to these women. But being able to drive has afforded Saudi women newfound independence as they no longer have to rely on male family members to travel to work or run errands. “I am single and I live with my family, of course, with my mother and my two sisters. I have two brothers, but they live with their wives, not in our house,” says Sarah Saleh, a driving student who hopes to get her license so she can stop relying on taxi services to get her and her mother places, since they have no men in their family to depend on for transportation.
“My husband, may God have mercy on his soul, died 11 years ago. So my life was a constant struggle,” says Sarah’s mother. “Now you just have to learn and hopefully you will have your car and feel free. You can come and go whenever you need, you can go to work, take me places, go get things for me…And even though I’m old, if I have the chance I will drive too. I won’t wait for you to come back from work…I’ll drive, so I can go to the market, to the doctor…I’m serious about driving. We can now, so I want to.”
Saudi women also have more financial freedom as they no longer have to spend money on taxi services and driving jobs such as Uber have become available to them. “During the economic wealth associated with oil, there wasn’t a great pressure for women to go out of their way and seek jobs. However, as this economic resource begins to dwindle and we are living in the post-oil economy, now it has become important for women to actually get jobs,” says Professor Madawl al-Rasheed.
Saudi Women’s Driving School isn’t just about women finally gaining the right to drive. This documentary is about what may happen next. Now that civil disobedience was shown as an effective way for women to gain the right to drive, other lack of freedoms surrounding guardianship—where women have to ask permission from male family members to travel abroad and attain passports—are being called into question. Women finally being able to drive is just the beginning of a social and political transformation for gender equality in Saudi Arabia.
Directed by Erica Gornall and produced by Nick London, Saudi Women’s Driving School premieres October 24 on HBO.
