CANNES: ARAB NEWS
Sunday 19 May 2013

Saudi filmmaker Haifaa Al-Mansour said yesterday that her country was becoming “more tolerant and more accepting.”
Al-Mansour, the Kingdom’s first woman film director, made her remarks after picking up an award at the Cannes Film Festival for her film “Wadjda.”

The 2012 film explores the tale of a young Saudi girl who plots to own a bicycle in defiance of a ban.

Filming “Wadjda” was an odyssey in itself, she said. During filming, neighborhood residents blocked shooting, or Mansour would have to direct from a van with a walkie-talkie since she could not be seen in public together with male crew.

“Conservatives in general, men and women, I think what they want is for women to exist in privacy, they want women to be in a certain way, the way that they know, the way that makes them feel secure and all that,” she said.

But, she added: “The country is not as it was before, all conservative, there is room now, there is room to bring in art and women’s rights and women’s issues, and people are more tolerant … So it is changing.”

Al-Mansour was invited to the Cannes Film Festival to pick up a prize in the “newcomers” category of the France-Culture Liberation awards.

Mansour argued that the future for women in her country was more promising.