RULE BREAKERS – Review by Valerie Kalfrin
When it resumed control of Afghanistan in 2021, the Taliban among other things banned girls from learning past the sixth grade. This mention in the epilogue of Rule Breakers casts a bitter shadow over this family drama meant to celebrate the power of knowledge.
Set largely between 2017 and 2019, Rule Breakers dramatizes the story of real-life Afghan entrepreneur Roya Mahboob, who after launching her own software company formed a high school girls’ robotics team, defying her country’s gender norms and traditions. Despite pushback from some relatives and political tensions, the girls earned medals in robotics competitions around the world.
Touching a computer for the first time was life-changing for Roya (Nikohl Boosheri, The Bold Type), as she tells a classroom of girls early in the film. As a child, she peeked through a classroom window to watch the boys—always just boys—learn about a monitor and keyboard. Once she got the chance to learn about computers herself, her whole world seemed to grow, something director Bill Guttentag (Spyral) and the special effects team charmingly illustrate with pop-up windows of world events on local streets and multicolored code scrolling along the street.
Undeterred by men who dismiss computers as “things that don’t concern you,” Roya and her sister, Elaha (Yekta Heidari), and her brother, Ali (Noorin Gulamgaus, Law & Order Toronto: Criminal Intent), campaign to have a computer class at their university, then teach computers to local girls. The robotics idea soon seems like a natural evolution, with Roya determined to show that science for girls isn’t nonsense.
Although a gunman fires at the siblings and Roya receives a few threats, the script by Guttentag, newcomer Jason Brown, and Elaha Mahboob largely skims over the fear and oppressiveness in the country at the time. (Roya wonders if she should be trying to get the girls scholarships “if the US leaves,” for instance, but the film doesn’t probe further.)
Where David Greenwald’s 2022 documentary Afghan Dreamers relayed more of the girls’ individual voices and the dangers they faced—such as the Taliban circulating their picture, ordering their deaths—Rule Breakers seems determined to keep things light. It glides over various obstacles, from denied visas and delayed gear to angry relatives, and peppy music abounds. Conflicts or hurdles in one scene resolve in the next, such as when one girl says she persuaded her restrictive uncle by saying how competing would help her find a husband. Yet such limited character development also means none of the girls stands out beyond Taara (Nina Hosseinzadeh, The Skinny), whose mechanic father gives the team a space to build and test their creations.
That said, Rule Breakers has its heart in such the right place that it’s hard not to root for its characters and its positive message of brain power. The film is most enjoyable at the competitions, where organizers note how technology unites people beyond politics and the girls meet other youths who light up with the same excitement over science.
It’s encouraging enough for young viewers until that epilogue, a necessary context that makes the girls’ triumphs bittersweet compared to so much lost progress and potential.
