UTV | Jeddah: Student Sama Kinsara adjusts her camera at Saudi Arabia’s only cinema school, her dream of seeing her work on the big screen coming into focus after the lifting of the country’s 35-year ban on cinema.
“Everything is about to change,” the first-year student of “visual and digital production” at Effat University in Jeddah told Reuters.
Her course is to be renamed “cinematic arts”, dropping the deceptive title employed originally to help stay under the radar of religious police and local communities opposed to the idea of men teaching women how to make movies.
Kinsara and her classmates on the four-year, women-only course have been able to film outside the university grounds for the first time.
“A girl carrying a camera and shooting in the streets is pushing boundaries,” said Mohammad Ghazala, head of Effat’s Visual and Digital Production Department, which began the course in 2013, Gulfnews reports.