Director Haifaa Al Mansour is highly regarded as a filmmaker. She completed a masters in directing and film studies at the University of Sydney, and her short films put her on the map. Her work is both praised and vilified in Saudi Arabia as she pushes the boundaries surrounding the traditional and restrictive culture.

I wasn't thinking too much about all of this when I decided to take my daughter. There are too few films with strong role models for girls of a certain age if you ignore the fantasy genre. Katniss Everdeen rocks but it's highly unlikely we'll ever really be playing the Hunger Games. Isn't it?

A few years ago, when my daughter was about 11, we watched I am Eleven, a fabulous documentary that spoke to several children across the world about their hopes and aspirations. It was interesting to watch her reaction to that film, the dawning realisation that there is more out there than middle-class Canberra and, if she really thinks about it, her life isn't quite as miserable as she sometimes thinks.

Now she's almost 13, there's more of that angst-ridden leaning. I understand, I've been there too, sometimes even now slip into that mode myself.

So it was fascinating to watch her watch Wadjda. There she was, curled up in the seat of the cinema in little denim shorts, devouring a choc-top, watching a girl about her age deal with problems of having to wear the full abaya, learning that her classmates have been married off, that her father was about to take a second wife.

We both even shed a little tear, at the same point which pleased me, I knew she had got the significance of a scene. It was just a little tear, she said later, flicking her pony tail, but she squeezed my hand in the dark on our way out.

Wadjda was a spirited little thing, not unlike my daughter, smart, rebellious to some extent, kind and not afraid to speak her mind. When she rolled her eyes at her mother, my daughter and I shoved each other in the dark. The universal language of childhood contempt.

In many ways it reminded me that no matter what our situation, no matter where we live, or what we do, what means the most in our lives is our relationships with people, with family, and friends. If among all the bleakness we can find moments of joy then there is some hope for the world.

But in the main, Wadjda did provoke a discussion on the way home about what life is like for women around the world. That, yes, in some countries, she would be married off at 13, perhaps even having babies; forced to cover her face; restricted from attending school or working in places where she might have to talk to men; that as a girl, her father would reject her if he had no sons; that she would have to hide her painted toenails and her friendships with boys.

It's a different world out there for sure and I think she realises that a little more now.

While it might sound as though there was a lot of despair in Wadjda, nothing could be further from the truth. There were so many moments of hope in the film that it buoyed us both.

When Wadjda and her classmates talk about a teacher behind her back; when Wadjda stands up to said school teacher; when she and her mother are on the balcony talking about love and happiness; when her friend Abdullah, the boy next door she wants to race her pushbike against, embraces her spirited nature and tells her he wants to marry her when they're older (a proposal that comes out of admiration and acceptance of her rebellion), they swap a smile that could mean our world will be different if we want it to.

And, without giving too much away, in the final scene when the wind is in her hair and nothing matters more, it proved to us both, my daughter and I, that sometimes it's all in the living and the doing, and while we're all too busy posturing we forget that.