Strict segregation of the sexes forced her to direct from inside a van
NEW YORK (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Haifaa al-Mansour, Saudi Arabia’s first female film director, directed the first movie entirely filmed within the religiously conservative kingdom while confined in the back of a van.
“Yes, when we go outside, the country’s segregated, and men and women are not expected to work in public together. So I had to be in a van, with a monitor and a walkie-talkie and tell everyone what to do and not to do, like screaming into the phone,” the 38-year-old said in a video interview with the Guardian.
“It was difficult, frustrating to be confined in a small space when everybody is outside.”
Yet al-Mansour, a soft-spoken woman, barely 5 feet tall, is neither angry nor resentful about the rigors and restrictions she faced in directing “Wadjda”, a film that depicts the challenges facing young women in Saudi Arabia.
“It’s exciting just to be part of what’s happening in Saudi now,” she told the Guardian. “It’s changing. It’s a moving society. And for me to just be part of it, it’s alright, like inside the van or outside the van. I think the most important thing is I was able to make a film, an authentic film and the first film entirely shot in Saudi. It’s an amazing thing and everything else is - eh,” she said, with a shrug.
The film tells the story of a young girl who yearns to buy a bicycle to race one of her male friends.
Her mother, ensnared in the old system, tells her that if she rides a bike she can never have children. But just recently, Saudi King Abdullah ruled that women can ride bicycles in parks and other entertainment areas if they are supervised by males and modestly clad in abayas, the body enclosing cloaks worn by Saudi women.
The Guardian asked al-Mansour if the film has made her a hero or a pariah. “Both,” she said, with a laugh.
“Now that Saudi Arabia is opening up and changing, there are many people that are pro women’s rights, and they want to see things happen and change. And there are some people who are very conservative, and they think women taking professions of this type threatens values and all of that. For me, I sympathise with that. Change is such a painful process.”
“Wadjda” debuts July 19 in theatres in the United Kingdom.
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