If you dislike Valentine’s Day, consider a trip to Saudi Arabia over February 14th; it is censored, rather than celebrated. “Every red rose vanishes from the malls,” says Saudi film director Haifaa Al Mansour, “There is nothing red to buy. Because it is a Western celebration and love is not popularised.”

In Saudi, public cinemas are illegal, women are forbidden to drive, political parties are unlawful and, yes, Valentine’s Day is banned. But the future of this most doctrinal of Arab countries is looking, if not more liberal, at least more Justin Bieber.

Consider the lead actress in Haifaa’s new film, Wadjda. Eleven years old, Waad Mohammed is an ordinary Saudi girl. She speaks not a jot of English but listens to Bieber and Miley Cyrus. The population is so startlingly young—49% are 25 or younger—that change seems inevitable.

Haifaa’s work is part of the gentle revolution at play in modern Saudi Arabia. Her film, Wadjda, is the first feature film ever to be shot in the country, taking the dusty streets of capital city, Riyadh, for its stage. This in spite of the director’s gender; a female film director is another first for Saudi Arabia.

Wadjda itself is a film of firsts. It portrays the gentle-but-persistent rebellions of its schoolgirl protagonist, Wadjda, as she tries to buy her first bicycle. It sounds like a commonplace dream, doesn’t it? A kid hankering after a bike. And yet Saudi women are not permitted to ride them in public. Bicycles, Haifaa tells me, are used only by children, workers, or people who aren’t rich enough to drive. What in the West is a quotidian object, for Wadjda symbolises her fraught realisation that, as she gets older, she is growing into a society of confinement and conservatism.

But what of Haifaa Al Mansour’s story? How much of Wadjda’s defiant spirit is her director’s? Haifaa, I learn, is both an outsider and native to Saudi Arabia. She describes her family background as liberal. She’s the daughter of a well-known poet, and has twelve siblings. Films were a big part of her childhood. “They weren’t intellectual,” says Haifaa, recalling them. “Mainly American films. Bollywood. Disney.”

Today she lives in Australia with her husband and children, having left aged twenty for an Egyptian university. But she says, emphatically, “I love Saudi Arabia. The culture. The food. How hot Saudi is. I love to speak very old Saudi, like a grandmother.” Climate, culture, food and language—these are defining points of our early life. There’s a palpable nostalgia for the Saudi Haifaa once knew as a child.

Yet the country of Haifaa’s memory is distinct from the one shaping the lives of her family today: the reality of her siblings, who still live there. For all her day-to-day distance from the country, the battle lines are still personal. “It’s hard for me to go there. I can’t start my own production company because I’m a woman. It’s who I am; that’s where I grew up. That doesn’t mean I’m not against it.”

At her most politically vocal, Haifaa filmed Women Without Shadows. She travelled around the Persian Gulf in 2005 asking women and men about the custom of the abaya: the loose, often black, robe that Saudi women are obliged to wear. Haifaa recorded an interview with a celebrity cleric. “I asked him if it was okay for women not to cover their faces,” she explains, “He said that it was cultural and not from Islam. The controversy went to the Supreme Court; they pushed him to change the statement. He then wrote to every publication, saying he had nothing to do with the film. It showed how religious figures in Saudi couldn’t be at liberty to give their opinion because they are pressured by their peers.”

In her next film, Haifaa focussed instead on creating the character of Wadjda, a young girl and an innocent iconoclast. “I based Wadjda a little on my niece who is very feisty,” she tells me, “She always wanted to play soccer and to be in the streets.” A fitting inspiration for Wadjda, with her bright red trainers poking out from under her abaya, whose best friend and fellow bicycle-fanatic is a boy.

In the film, the sense of possibility for Wadjda is heavy: after the battle for a bicycle, what fight might come next? As for Haifaa’s niece, her fate is known. “My brother, her father,” she explains, “although not conservative, is a Saudi. He wants her to wear the veil, stay at home and give up a lot of things. And I felt that that was very sad. Saudi girls, when they grow up, have to give up their dreams because their culture does not accept this.”

Haifaa might have taken the same path, remained in Saudi and lived her life within its tradition and laws. Instead through her determined and ground-breaking film work she’s found a potent way of challenging this order.

In a country without a film industry, without female emancipation, the barriers she has had to overcome seem little short of insurmountable. Wadjda took five years to make, and she was forced to direct it sitting in a van while filming in conservative areas. But when I ask about the battles she has won, she corrects me: “No, I don’t see it as battles. It’s about being a politician, and having a conversation.”

Like the Hollywood films she watched as a child, Haifaa aims to entertain, rather than protest. “I only wanted to show a real slice of life in Saudi,” she says. “I want to have my own space and my own voice. And I want other girls to have the same.” The storytelling is a protest in itself.

Wadjda is out in the UK on July 19th.