A film director from Saudi Arabia One of the country's best-known and most controversial film director, Haifaa al-Monsour is the first female Saudi filmmaker. Hailed as trailblazer for the Saudi women her film Wadjda was submitted in the best foreign language category of the 2014 Oscars and has already garnered a cluster of awards, shows life in the kingdom as nothing before. It follows a 10-year-old tomboy - Wadjda - who has set her heart on buying a bike. The first feature shot entirely in Saudi Arabia. It takes audience inside lower middle-class Riyadh. Its dusty shops, crowded migrant quarters and classrooms of sniggering girls. The zest and warmth with which Wadjda's story is told make its harsher realities all the more. After her study in Cairo al-Mansour took to making short films as a hobby and solace.