Saudi actress Fatima Al-Banawi named new Cartier ambassador for the Middle East

The French jewellery house chose the actress and filmmaker to be the latest friend of the maison

Fatima Al-Banawi attended the glittering launch of Cartier's new high jewellery collection at Lake Como in Italy. Courtesy Cartier

Actress and filmmaker Fatima Al-Banawi, who hails from Saudi Arabia, was named by Cartier as its latest ambassador for the Middle East region.

Over the weekend, the French jewellery house unveiled its latest high jewellery collection, entitled Sixieme Sens par Cartier, at Lake Como in Italy.

The glittering event was hosted by Cyrille Vigneron, president and chief executive of Cartier, Egyptian actress Yasmine Sabri, filmmaker Nadine Labaki, and Princess Deena Aljuhani Abdulaziz, a Saudi entrepreneur and former Vogue Arabia editor, who were all joined by Al-Banawi in her new role.

Al-Banawi is not only a writer, actress and filmmaker, but she also graduated from Harvard University with a master's degree in theological studies, specialising in women, gender and Islamic studies, and holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Effat University in Jeddah.

On a self-declared mission to "[unearth] personal, social and universal meanings through art", according to her website, Al-Banawi rose to fame in 2016, for her role in Barakah Meets Barakah, which showed at the Berlin International Film Festival and was Saudi Arabia's entrant for Best Foreign Language Film at the 89th Academy Awards.

In 2018, she was named by Time magazine as a Next Generation Leader, for co-founding The Other Story Project in Saudi Arabia, which has gathered almost 5,000 true stories from strangers and turned them into productions, including short film A Blink of an Eye.

More recently, her acting work has included the Egyptian Netflix series Paranormal and Al Shak (The Doubt), which she co-wrote, directed and starred in, all from her home during the pandemic in 2020, according to IMDb.

She's a woman with many strings to her bow, as, in 2017, she was also selected for a Nike advertising campaign to highlight Arab pioneers, while later that same year she was involved in a Tedx event in Saudi Arabia.

At the start of 2020, her first feature film project Basma was chosen by the Red Sea Festival, while her short film, Until We See the Light, was one of five films by Saudi female directors to be highlighted in a project focused on the achievements of women from the kingdom.

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