Haifaa al Mansour gave an interview to Al Jazeera English's program One on One this week.
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There is a brief article at Al Jazeera on the interview; you can watch the second part of the interview on YouTube as well. Al Mansour is a female Saudi filmmaker, which is a pretty big deal in a country where women cannot drive and there are no movie theaters, and in the interview she talks about her goals for filmmaking, the emotional experience of communicating with the women of al Hassa, a village in the Eastern Province where she filmed her most splash-making movie, Women Without Shadows, and growing up in a family with twelve children.
Of course it takes an exceptional person to confront the Saudi religious establishment in this fashion, but often taking on an opposition role prompts opposition-style thinking where you see things in binaries. Haifaa al Mansour's discussion about the way women live in Saudi Arabia is nuanced and honest – several times in the interview she corrects the interview as he tries to get her to, you know, explain to women in the west what it's like to live in Saudi. Women have different experiences for a lot of reasons, she insists, and her experience in Saudi Arabia in an educated family was entirely different from the experience of many of the women she interviewed in al Hassa for her film. She refuses to efface class differences in favor of highlighting religious or cultural ones, and that in itself makes the interview worthwhile.
Last year, al Mansour won a prize at the 2nd Jeddah Film Festival; winning a Saudi prize at a film festival marks a change from the private screening she had to give when her film was first released in 2005.
