Haifaa al-Mansour

Haifaa al-Mansour (born 10 August 1974) is a Saudi Arabian film director, one of the country's best-known and one of its first female filmmakers. ¹ Her feature debut Wadjda (2012) was the first full-length feature shot entirely in Saudi Arabia. ¹ No source read for this record names a school or affiliation for her personally, and her faith is recorded as unknown in her data record. ¹

She is the eighth of twelve children of Abdul Rahman Mansour, a poet and lawyer, and grew up in Al-Hasa. ¹ Her family was liberal and non-traditional: the children were allowed music, books, magazines, television and films at a time when cinemas were banned in Saudi Arabia, from 1983 until the ban was lifted in 2018. ¹ With her father's encouragement she studied comparative literature at the American University in Cairo, worked at an oil company and taught English, and later completed a master's degree in film studies at the University of Sydney. ¹

She began with three shorts — Who?, The Bitter Journey and The Only Way Out, the last winning prizes in the United Arab Emirates and the Netherlands — and the documentary Women Without Shadows, on the hidden lives of women in the Gulf Arab states, which won the Golden Dagger for Best Documentary at the Muscat Film Festival. ¹

Wadjda, which she wrote and directed, premiered at the 2012 Venice Film Festival; it tells of a 10-year-old girl in suburban Riyadh who dreams of owning and riding a green bicycle. ¹ Because of the segregation of men and women, she directed much of it from a small van with a monitor and a walkie-talkie. ¹ The film, backed by Rotana, was selected as Saudi Arabia's entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards, the first time Saudi Arabia had submitted a film. ¹

She did not intend her work to focus on women's issues but found them too important not to address, and both Who? and Women Without Shadows deal with the custom of the abaya. ¹ The English article records that she received hate mail and criticism for being unreligious, which she denies, and praise from Saudis for encouraging discussion of topics usually considered taboo. ¹ That denial names no affiliation, and it is recorded here as she is reported to have made it, without any school being inferred for her. ¹

Her Mary Shelley premiered at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival, followed by Nappily Ever After (2018) and The Perfect Candidate (2019), the first feature supported by the new Saudi Film Council. ¹ She served on the Un Certain Regard jury at Cannes in 2015 and received a Crystal Award at Davos in 2019 for her leadership in cultural transformation in the Arab world. ¹ She lives in California with her husband, the American diplomat Bradley Niemann, and their two children. ¹

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