BASIC REPRESENTATION SCORE: 0
[no significant representation of girls/women]
FEMALE AGENCY/POWER/AUTHORITY SCORE: 0
[no significant representation of women in authority]
THE MALE GAZE SCORE: 0
[no issues]
GENDER/SEXUALITY SCORE: 0
[no issues]
WILDCARD SCORE: -2
Is there anything either positive or negative in the film’s representation of women not already accounted for here? (points will vary)
The story opens on scenes of daily life in a Bedouin camp, which would certainly contain lots of girls and women doing all sorts of essential everyday jobs, and yet no girls or women appear onscreen at all: not in the background, not as the mother of the young father-orphaned male protagonist, nowhere. Women have simply been erased from this culture.
TOTAL SCORE: -2
IS THE FILM’S DIRECTOR FEMALE? No (does not impact scoring)
IS THE FILM’S SCREENWRITER FEMALE? No (does not impact scoring)
BOTTOM LINE: No girls or women appear in this movie at all. (There is a photo of a woman, a wife far away in another land, but that’s it.) Which is very strange, because the world in which this is set is not an all-male environment.
Click here for the ongoing ranking of 2015’s films for female representation.
Click here for the ranking of 2015’s Oscar-nominated films for female representation.
NOTE: This is not a “review” of Theeb! It is simply an examination of how well or how poorly it represents women. (A movie that represents women well can still be a terrible film; a movie that represents women poorly can still be a great film.) Read my review of Theeb.
See the full rating criteria. (Criteria that do not apply to this film have been deleted in this rating for maximum readability.)
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