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Elle Fanning is the title character in Haifaa Al Mansour’s “Mary Shelley”(photo: Parallel Films (Storm) Limited) 

Saudi Arabian director Haifaa Al Mansour made her name as the first female director from het country to make a feature film. 2012’s beautiful tale of a young girl with dreams, “Wadjda”, was hailed for its unique vision.

The title character of her second feature, “Mary Shelley”, also has dreams. The daughter of author and women’s rights activist Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary (played by Elle Fanning) yearns to be a writer but faces the disapproval of her stepmother. But a meeting with the celebrated poet and renowned bon vivant Percy Bysshe Shelley (played here by Douglas Booth) changes Mary’s life. She and her stepsister run away with the romantic but penniless Shelley and end up at the Lake Geneva villa of another master of debauchery Lord Byron (Tom Sturridge). It is here that Byron and his guests challenge each other to create ghost stories on a stormy night, and the genesis of “Frankenstein” is born.

A coproduction between the United Kingdom, Luxembourg and the USA, “Mary Shelley” was filmed in Ireland and the grand duchy.

“Mary Shelley” is being screened at 7 p.m. at Kinepolis Kirchberg on Tuesday 27 February and again at 7 p.m. at the Ciné Utopia in Limpertsberg on Saturday 3 March.