Saudi solutions / VPRO Backlight presents ; director, Bregtje van der Haak.

Filmmaker Bregtje van der Haak, the first Western filmmaker ever granted permission to film the lives of Saudi women, takes us inside this closed society where fewer than five percent of women work. She profiles several women with professional careers-including a journalist, a doctor, a photographer, a television newsreader, a university professor, and the nation's first female airplane pilot-and asks them to explain what it means to be a modern woman in a fundamentalist Islamic society. In an interview with Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, owner of Kingdom Holding Company, the filmmaker finds an isolated enclave of progressive attitudes toward women. In his office building and private palace, half of the employees are women, who are unveiled and dressed in the latest fashions, although "the ladies" work, he emphasizes, in an "Islamically correct" environment.