Haifaa Al Mansour
-
From Small Town to Big Buzz: How Wadjda Became the Realization of Haifaa Al-Mansour’s Hollywood Dreams
Growing up in Saudi Arabia, writer-director Haifaa Al-Mansour didn’t have access to movie theaters (there aren’t any), but she was still raised on a Hollywood diet. She ate up all the popular cinema she could via home video, and began forging a long-term love affair with the kind of infectious traditions found in big-budget American films. Those same traditions have spilled over, somewhat, into Wadjda, Al-Mansour’s groundbreaking debut feature, which is both the first movie filmed entirely in Saudi Arabia, and the first feature to be helmed by a female Saudi director. An arthouse release that premiered at the Venice […]
by R. Kurt Osenlund on Sep 12, 2013 -
Wadjda Breaks Ground with First Ever Feature Film From Saudi Arabia
The best type of filmmaking takes us into worlds we’ve never seen before. Through cinema, we can journey into the past, into the future, to outer space, just around the corner, or to the ends of the world. But there’s one place we haven’t been, until now. A new film, Wadjda, breaks down one giant cinematic barrier, marking the first feature fully shot in Saudi Arabia in the history of film. And on top of that, its director, Haifaa Al Mansour, is a woman. Wadjda, played by Waad Mohammed, is a 10-year-old girl growing up in a world built upon […]
by Ariston Anderson on Jan 30, 2013 -
2012 Dubai International Film Festival Marks a Pioneering Year for Arab Cinema
It’s difficult to walk around Dubai without being in constant awe of one’s surroundings. The modern city is nothing short of incredible. Built from the ground up within the last 40 years, a main argument it is using to win a World Expo bid in 2020, Dubai seems to boast the biggest and best in the world whether it’s fountains, skyscrapers or gold-plated flag poles. And when it comes to all things grand, the Dubai International Film Festival is no exception. Last year’s festival was taken over by Hollywood with the premiere of Mission: Impossible 4, a film complete with […]
by Ariston Anderson on Dec 19, 2012
