Life&style
Al-Mansour has not had an easy ride and had to learn a particular set of skills in order to sell herself and her films in the highly-competitive industry.
“In filmmaking, specifically, finding funding is always hard. For me, coming from a place where there’s no film industry, it’s even harder to find the right partners who see your vision and help you realize that vision. It took me five years to find any interest in my first film and even now, after three successful features, financing is still difficult — it’s just how the business works.
“For me personally, as an artist, it was also hard to be a saleswoman, but I had to do it. It was worth doing all that to bring my story to life.”
Al-Mansour has broken out onto the international movie scene — her newly-released film “Mary Shelley” stars Hollywood star Elle Fanning and tells the story of a teenager’s romance with English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley — but Saudi Arabia remains close to her heart.
“Women in Saudi Arabia have been fighting very hard for their rights, there are a lot of people who are very active there and Saudi society is moving forward. Change is a very painful process, every society needs to take its own pace to embrace change. It’s going in the right direction though… it has been happening for a long time, but now it’s really accelerating,” she said.
Women have played an important part in Al-Mansour’s life, so much so that she credits her mother as being a role model. “My mother definitely is the strongest influence in my life. She is a very strong woman and I really appreciate everything she has done to help me develop my own voice. She was an everyday rebel — standing up for herself in small ways. She didn’t care about criticism, how people saw her, as long as she was happy.
“In cinema, my biggest inspiration would probably be the (Belgian filmmaker duo) Dardenne brothers. I find their films very moving and when I saw ‘Rosetta’ (the Palme d’Or winner at Cannes 1999), it was one of the first times I realized how cinema can touch people’s minds.”