'The Perfect Candidate' and What It Can Teach Us

The Perfect Candidate, a film directed by Haifaa Al Mansour, is full of life, love, and fundamental truths. The characters are lovable, relatable, amusing— and they’re also Saudi Arabian. The main character wears a niqab in public, a piece of clothing used by Muslim women. The men in the movie wear a ghutra, the checkered red and white piece of cloth secured with a band on top of the head. All these are things that Western society is unused to. The Perfect Candidate accomplishes not just a moving story, but also a story of people doing normal things.

The film centers around a family living in a town in Saudi Arabia. The mother is deceased, the father is a musician, and they have three daughters. One of the daughters, Maryam, is a doctor who ends up, by chance, running a political campaign for a local election. The story is about both politics and family. Director Al Mansour said, “I’m trying to create a dialogue… (to) move the society forward.” The Perfect Candidate certainly accomplishes this. All of the female characters in the movie are smart, determined, loving, independent, and funny; they do not fit into any stereotypes. The sisters are three-dimensional and individual and unique, just like real-life Muslim women.

When you give humanity to someone, you get empathy back. Western media hasn’t given us many positive representations of Arab people, especially women. “These are women who are trying to just be normal… not trying to be the person doing shootings on the news,” as Al Mansour said. The Perfect Candidate also reminds us that though many women have more rights than ever before, there is still a long way to go for feminism around the world. That’s why intersectional feminism (advocating for the combination of women’s different identities, like sexuality and race, and not only for women in general) is so important— not all women’s experiences are the same. We have a long way to go.