Haifaa al-Mansour came to worldwide attention in 2012 with Wadjda, both the first-ever feature by a Saudi woman and the first shot entirely inside Saudi Arabia. Even she was surprised by the idea that her next film would be about the 19th-century English author. “But when she read the script, Ms. Mansour was amazed at the parallels between Shelley’s struggles to publish her masterpiece, Frankenstein, and make a name for herself as a writer, and her own experience as an aspiring artist in a conservative Muslim culture in which women have traditionally been denied the same rights as men.”