LEILA AND THE WOLVES (1984)
Randwick Ritz, Sydney:
12:30 PM
Saturday May 03
Lido Cinemas, Melbourne:
12:30 PM
Saturday May 10
Rating: MA15+
Duration: 90 minutes
Country: UK, Lebanon, France, Belgium, Holland, Sweden
Language: Arabic with English subtitles
Cast: Nabila Zeitouni, Rafik Ali Ahmad, Raja Nehme
Director: Heiny Srour
SYDNEY TICKETS ⟶
MELBOURNE TICKETS ⟶
12:30 PM
Saturday May 03
Lido Cinemas, Melbourne:
12:30 PM
Saturday May 10
Rating: MA15+
Duration: 90 minutes
Country: UK, Lebanon, France, Belgium, Holland, Sweden
Language: Arabic with English subtitles
Cast: Nabila Zeitouni, Rafik Ali Ahmad, Raja Nehme
Director: Heiny Srour
SYDNEY TICKETS ⟶
MELBOURNE TICKETS ⟶
2K RESTORATION – AUSTRALIAN PREMIERE
“Visually, Heiny Srour’s film is a treat, combining tinted newsreel footage with memorable images and clearly loving shots of a strife-torn nation; the acts of courage she reveals, and the example she sets to other film-makers to engage their own history, are exalting.” Frances Dickinson, Time Out Film Guide
“Ignored and forgotten, the role of Arab women in the Middle East’s political history is illuminated here for the first time…Using narrative structures of the ‘mosaic’, a common device in oriental stories, Leila travels through time from the British Mandate of Palestine to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, participating in the insurrections of the 1920s, the revolution of 1936-39 – during which women organised a wedding to transport weapons – and the massacre of the Palestinian village of Deir-Yassin…
“Acclaimed by critics for its originality and the talent of its director Leila and the Wolves was distributed worldwide but censored in most Arab countries. Thanks to this new restoration we rediscover a work of great complexity, which even in its most imperfect moments, speaks beyond its, albeit fundamental, feminist message.” Cecilia Cenciarelli, Il Cinema Ritrovato 2023.
Introduced by Elly Carantinos at Ritz Cinemas and Samia Mikhail at Lido Cinemas.
This program is presented with the generous support of Adrienne Davidson.
“Visually, Heiny Srour’s film is a treat, combining tinted newsreel footage with memorable images and clearly loving shots of a strife-torn nation; the acts of courage she reveals, and the example she sets to other film-makers to engage their own history, are exalting.” Frances Dickinson, Time Out Film Guide
“Ignored and forgotten, the role of Arab women in the Middle East’s political history is illuminated here for the first time…Using narrative structures of the ‘mosaic’, a common device in oriental stories, Leila travels through time from the British Mandate of Palestine to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, participating in the insurrections of the 1920s, the revolution of 1936-39 – during which women organised a wedding to transport weapons – and the massacre of the Palestinian village of Deir-Yassin…
“Acclaimed by critics for its originality and the talent of its director Leila and the Wolves was distributed worldwide but censored in most Arab countries. Thanks to this new restoration we rediscover a work of great complexity, which even in its most imperfect moments, speaks beyond its, albeit fundamental, feminist message.” Cecilia Cenciarelli, Il Cinema Ritrovato 2023.
Introduced by Elly Carantinos at Ritz Cinemas and Samia Mikhail at Lido Cinemas.
This program is presented with the generous support of Adrienne Davidson.
FILM NOTES
By Lucia Sorbera
By Lucia Sorbera
Associate Professor Lucia Sorbera is Chair of Arabic Language and Cultures, University of Sydney.
HEINY SROUR
Heiny Srour is a multi-award-winning filmmaker and a primary force behind what in the 1970s was known as Third World cinema. She directed two feature films across the 1970s and the 1980s, and five short documentaries in the following decades, all of them expressing both her interest in aesthetic experimentation and her political interest in feminism and socialism. Born in 1943 into a multi-religious middle-class Lebanese-Jewish family in Beirut, which (as was common before the establishment of the state of Israel) had Christian and Muslim family members, she received a broad and humanist education, which opened her to the ideas of Arab feminism and progressive anti-sectarian Arab leftist ideologies, including those of progressive Arab Jews.
Srour studied sociology at the Saint Joseph University in Beirut, where she was also a member of the Front de force étudiante/Jabha al-Quwa al-Talibiya (Student Power Front), a left-leaning political organisation that included students from the Palestinian Liberation Movement, and she continued her doctoral studies in social anthropology at The Sorbonne in Paris. There she studied with anthropologist Germaine Tillion and Marxist anti-Zionist sociologist and holocaust survivor Maxime Rodinson, who were both very influential on her. Like many Arab feminist leftist intellectuals of her generation, she was disappointed in the nationalist turn of the mainstream Arab Left following the 1967 defeat by Israel, particularly about their dismissal of women’s demands for equality.
Srour’s general disenchantment with the Arab left stirred her curiosity towards the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf (PFLOAG, formerly Dhofar Liberation Front), when she interviewed a male delegate of PFLOAG in Paris, who proudly mentioned to her that the reform they were most proud of was the reform for women’s liberation. This encounter led her to start researching to film a documentary about the PFLOAG – The Hour of Liberation Has Sounded: The Struggle in Oman (Sa‘t al-Tahrir Daqqat: Barra ya Isti’mar, 1974) – which became the first film directed by an Arab woman to be presented at Cannes Film Festival. It was also awarded the Grand Prix du Scénario by the Agence de Coopération Culturelle et Technique (Agency for Cultural and Technical Cooperation: ACCT), headed at the time by renowned socialist film critic Tahar Cheriaa. The film, which is both a celebration of the fight for liberation of the people of Oman and a denunciation of petro-colonialism, was banned for forty-five years in Lebanon and never broadcast on Arab television, but it contributed to establishing Srour as an important filmmaker, giving her enough credibility to produce her following films, which intersected feminist themes with a denunciation of the links between imperialism and capitalism in the post-colonial world.
Besides her own vanguard work, Srour was also committed to filling the gender gap in the Arab film industry, and in 1978, with Tunisian filmmaker Salma Baccar and Egyptian film historian Magda Wassef, she co-authored a manifesto: ‘For the Self-Expression of the Arab Woman’, which included the establishment of an award to support emerging Arab women filmmakers.
Srour is currently committed to the project of restoration of her major works, through which she continues to support the struggles for socio-economic justice around the world. Srour made two feature films: The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived (1974), on which she was director, editor and scriptwriter, and Leila and the Wolves (1984), as director and scriptwriter. She also made several short films and documentaries: Bread of Our Mountains (1968, lost during the Lebanese Civil War); The Singing Sheikh (1991); Rising Above: Women of Vietnam (1997); The Eyes of the Heart (1998); Women of Vietnam (1998) and Woman Global Strike 2000 (2000).
Srour studied sociology at the Saint Joseph University in Beirut, where she was also a member of the Front de force étudiante/Jabha al-Quwa al-Talibiya (Student Power Front), a left-leaning political organisation that included students from the Palestinian Liberation Movement, and she continued her doctoral studies in social anthropology at The Sorbonne in Paris. There she studied with anthropologist Germaine Tillion and Marxist anti-Zionist sociologist and holocaust survivor Maxime Rodinson, who were both very influential on her. Like many Arab feminist leftist intellectuals of her generation, she was disappointed in the nationalist turn of the mainstream Arab Left following the 1967 defeat by Israel, particularly about their dismissal of women’s demands for equality.
Srour’s general disenchantment with the Arab left stirred her curiosity towards the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf (PFLOAG, formerly Dhofar Liberation Front), when she interviewed a male delegate of PFLOAG in Paris, who proudly mentioned to her that the reform they were most proud of was the reform for women’s liberation. This encounter led her to start researching to film a documentary about the PFLOAG – The Hour of Liberation Has Sounded: The Struggle in Oman (Sa‘t al-Tahrir Daqqat: Barra ya Isti’mar, 1974) – which became the first film directed by an Arab woman to be presented at Cannes Film Festival. It was also awarded the Grand Prix du Scénario by the Agence de Coopération Culturelle et Technique (Agency for Cultural and Technical Cooperation: ACCT), headed at the time by renowned socialist film critic Tahar Cheriaa. The film, which is both a celebration of the fight for liberation of the people of Oman and a denunciation of petro-colonialism, was banned for forty-five years in Lebanon and never broadcast on Arab television, but it contributed to establishing Srour as an important filmmaker, giving her enough credibility to produce her following films, which intersected feminist themes with a denunciation of the links between imperialism and capitalism in the post-colonial world.
Besides her own vanguard work, Srour was also committed to filling the gender gap in the Arab film industry, and in 1978, with Tunisian filmmaker Salma Baccar and Egyptian film historian Magda Wassef, she co-authored a manifesto: ‘For the Self-Expression of the Arab Woman’, which included the establishment of an award to support emerging Arab women filmmakers.
Srour is currently committed to the project of restoration of her major works, through which she continues to support the struggles for socio-economic justice around the world. Srour made two feature films: The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived (1974), on which she was director, editor and scriptwriter, and Leila and the Wolves (1984), as director and scriptwriter. She also made several short films and documentaries: Bread of Our Mountains (1968, lost during the Lebanese Civil War); The Singing Sheikh (1991); Rising Above: Women of Vietnam (1997); The Eyes of the Heart (1998); Women of Vietnam (1998) and Woman Global Strike 2000 (2000).
THE FILM
‘Will this war ever end?’
It is the end of the summer of 1982, the seventh year of the war in Lebanon, Israel has invaded on 6 June, and a young woman, Leila (Nabila Zeituni), sits in the living room of her bourgeois family’s apartment in Beirut. The sound of the bombardments is a macabre soundtrack, and the mirror she holds in her hands is a magic device that takes her in an imaginative journey across time, where the first stop is her own future.
She is now a grandmother, surrounded by daughters and nieces, but not much seems to have changed. Time is still marked by war and patriarchy. The Leila of 1982 wonders: ‘Will I become like that?’ The desolate tone in her voice suggests that this is not her wish.
With the power characterising her filmic narrative style, a masterful and unique blend of documentation and surrealism, Heiny Srour unapologetically discloses, with the first scene of Leila and the Wolves, the poetics of a script that in 1979 was enthusiastically welcomed by the Agence de Coopération Culturelle et Technique (ACCT, Agency of Cultural and Technical Cooperation), which had been established in 1970 at Niamei, Niger, upon the initiative of the then President of Senegal, Léopold Senghor, to bring together twenty-one francophone states. Especially enthusiastic was the then Chair of the selection committee, Tahar Cheriaa, who had founded the Carthage Film Festival, the first Pan-African and Pan-Arab film festival, in 1966. Since then he was considered a father figure for young Arab and African filmmakers of the Tricontinental era (1). No wonder that Leila and the Wolves, shot amidst the intense danger of active war zones in Lebanon and Syria in the early 1980s, after a struggle to secure funding, received multiple awards after its first screenings in 1984. Today, the film is considered Srour’s masterpiece; it is both a deep appraisal of the intertwining colonial histories of Palestine and Lebanon, and a sharp critique of the erasure of women’s participation in the resistance movements.
Srour takes neither a pedagogical nor a pedantic approach to the story she narrates. To achieve that, the main character, Leila, takes the viewer on a transtemporal journey across ‘the land where the olives grow’, as the eldest women in the film refer to the Bilad al-Sham (The Land of the Orient, the name the region of Palestine, Lebanon and Syria was known by in pre-colonial times). The journey spans from the early twentieth century to the mid-1980s in the middle of the Lebanese war.
Reminiscent of the structure of some of the classics of Arabic literature – the mosaic – where the same characters appear across multiple short stories which are contained within a frame story. Leila and her partner Rafiq (Rafiq Ali Ahmed) travel across the 1920s uprisings against the British mandate in Palestine, the Palestinian anti-colonial revolts of 1936-39, the Palestinian Nakba of 1948 and proclamation of the State of Israel, the new exodus of Palestinians following the 1967 Six Day War, the militarisation of the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon that followed the Black September expulsion of Palestinians from Jordan in 1970, and through the first seven years of the Lebanese war. Significantly, Srour does not use either “civil war” (as in international scholarship), or ahdath/évènements (“events” in vernacular Lebanese) to describe the Lebanese ordeal between 1975 and 1990.
By naming it just a ‘war,’ Sroury challenges both the imperial narrative, which omits the responsibility of regional and international actors in it, and also the over-emphasis on “sectarianism”, instead of acknowledging the socio-economic roots of the war. She also addressed the amnesia with which Lebanese society decided to deal with the trauma, by refusing to even name it. Moreover, the early 1980s were not marked only by war in Lebanon. These were also the times when women’s studies were becoming established as an academic field across the Middle East region, with the pioneering works produced by feminist historians specialising in the study of the Arab world that were already circulating among the major Arab, American, British and European universities. Srour, a graduate from the Saint Joseph University of Beirut and The Sorbonne, had certainly been exposed to feminist scholarship. As she declared in an interview, she was inspired by the book by Khadijeh Al-Habashneh (known also under her husband’s name, Abu Ali), a scholar, psychologist, filmmaker, and co-founder of the Palestinian Film Unit in Beirut, about Palestinian women’s political activism in the late 1960s (2) and also by family histories and by stories she read in the letters published by Lebanese newspapers and told by Lebanese women friends (3).When she wrote Leila and the Wolves, Srour was not new to the feminist research methodologies, which she had already adopted when she filmed The Hour of Liberation (1974), a feature about the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf (PFLOAG), in which she documented the centrality that this movement acknowledged to women’s militancy and their liberation.
If The Hour of Liberation, through the celebration of the approach to revolution of the PFLOAG, was an insider’s critique of the attitude of Arab nationalism and the traditionalism within the revolutionary movements, which indefinitely postponed women’s liberation “until victory,” Leila and the Wolves digs deeper into the mechanisms of history writing, reclaiming women’s space in it. Srour relies on her main character, Leila, to produce a shift in the narrative of history. In the initial months of the Lebanese war, Leila and her partner Rafiq are both in London, where Rafiq is curating an art exhibition dedicated to Palestinian history. Leila walks through it and she notices that women are not portrayed in the photos he has selected: she asks, ‘What is your problem with women? The photos you show only have men.’ Rafiq’s answer is categorical: ‘I don’t remember seeing any women. At that time, women had nothing to do with politics.’
This dialogue shifts the focus from a mere analysis of women’s suffering and heroism during war (something that has a long history in world cinema, reaching one of its peaks in Italian neorealism), to a far more feminist critique of the gendered politics of knowledge production. Some scholars have not hesitated to define it as ‘decolonial’, underlining that it transcends the anti-colonial militant practices of Third Worldist, nationalist cinema to emphasise nonlinear narratives and plural epistemologies (Saglier, 2022). Srour’s alter-ego, Leila, cannot accept this response, and she takes revenge on Rafiq. She wears the white gown that he would like her to put on for the opening of the exhibition he is curating, and she takes him in a transtemporal journey through collective memory, across lands populated by women warriors who throw boiling water at the British soldiers in Palestine in the 1920s, fake a wedding ceremony to smuggle weapons to Mount Carmel in support of the revolts of 1936-39, and are killed alongside the men in the massacre of the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin perpetrated by the Jewish Irgun militia in 1948. She observes the displaced Palestinian women refugees during the 1948 Nakba turning into trainee fighters in the refugee camps in Lebanon, and Lebanese women shooting against snipers during the war of the streets in Beirut between 1975 and 1977. For each one of these sequences, Leila appears like a ghost in her white gown, assigning to Rafiq every time a different role, from the Arab military that collaborates with the British colonialists, to the anxious uncle of a young woman who wants to join the militias; he is worried about her future reputation, more than her life.
In this film the big history, which is the history of war in Palestine and Lebanon amidst colonialism and the directly referenced consequences of the European Holocaust, intersects people’s history, and particularly the history of young women who try not to surrender to family plans to withdraw them from school in order to get them ready for marriage, and who face domestic violence and an unequal family law (which women in Lebanon have been fighting to change since the birth of the independent state in 1943, and are still fighting to ameliorate).
The experimental language and montage of the film, which covers eighty years of history from a women’s and feminist point of view, allows Srour to develop a narrative that is not simply modernist and teleological, and it questions the linearity of women’s liberation. In Leila and the Wolves, women face injustice not only in the traditional spaces dominated by family rules and religion, but also in the modern and progressive leftist and militant fields. Patriarchy intersects and transcends both spheres. Emblematic of this vision is the sequence that shows a seamstress in tears in a refugee camp in Lebanon – where women are trained to fight – before the war, in 1975. The woman is desperate because her husband, a revolutionary, has divorced her, and has taken away their five children. As it moves from the crying woman to the women fighters standing at the door of her house, the camera rests on a poster hanging at the door: ‘The Palestinian Women on the Road to Liberation.’ The contrast is mediated by the rage of a third female character on the scene, who addresses the fighters: ‘Are these the results of women’s mobilisation? Is this the liberation you wanted for women?’
Liberation and revolution do not necessarily align, and the revolution, as it has been carried on in the twentieth century, does not always happen in the best interest of women. Emancipation also comes at a high cost when the structures of patriarchy remain in place. As one of the characters in the film, an accomplished young women manager in Beirut in the early 1980s, confides to her friend: ‘Equality is exhausting!
Multiple questions lurk throughout the film, a film that inquires into the long-term effects of colonisation and multiple wars in Palestine and Lebanon through the twentieth century and does so without indulging in nationalist or mainstream revolutionary rhetoric. If colonialism and patriarchy are co-constitutive, nationalism is not a third way: as Srour says, ‘I denounce the first as an implacable enemy, and I critique the latter as a comrade concerned with a healthy resolution of what is today called “the contradiction within the people”’.(4) Leila’s transhistorical journey facing the wolves (which are both colonialism and patriarchy) seems to suggest that women face multiple layers of violence, and their erasure from history writing, is crucial to the perceived legitimacy of this violence.
At the beginning of the film, and in the exhibition that Rafiq sets up in London, only men are in the photos retrieved from the archives, while women are in the realm of orality, which is made of folklore stories and popular songs. Folklore stories and songs are the voices of the dispossessed, and they shape the collective memory, but it is the mediation of the historian that ensures that the dispossessed becomes subjects of history. This is what Heiny Srour’s intervention does. With her work, which masterfully reads the archive against the grain, finding traces of women’s history and blending archival footage and oral history with her own camerawork, Srour contributes to the feminist historians’ effort to write Palestinian and Lebanese women into the realm of history, and she draws on a methodology of storytelling that is in conversation with other women masters of “Third World Cinema”, first and foremost Assia Djebar, Selma Bakkar, Nabbeha Lotfi, Jocelyne Saab, Atteyat el-Abnoudy and, later, Arab Lutfi and Tahani Rachid. Srour deconstructs historically rooted prejudices about the relationship between women and history and particularly women and war, by rejecting both the chauvinistic narrative that women in the past had nothing to do with politics, and the maternalistic narrative that women are naturally inclined to peace. Forty years after its first screening, as the world faces a rapid escalation of both war and genocide, Leila and the Wolves remains a masterpiece that has a lot to tell its viewer, and its restoration, by France’s Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée in 2021, has proven to be a timely and perceptive decision. (5)
Notes
1. Cecilia Cenciarelli, ‘Film Notes’, Il Cinema Ritrovato, 2023 https://festival.ilcinemaritrovato.it/en/film/layla-wa-ziab/
2. Khadijeh Habashneh, Introductions about Women in Reality: The Experience of Women in the Palestinian Resistance Movement, Published by General Union of Palestinian Women, Beirut-Lebanon, 1975 (in Arabic).
3. Elhum Shakerifar and Heiny Srour, ‘Leila and the Wolves 40th anniversary: Heiny Srour on her time-travelling take of Arab womanhood’, May 2024, https://www.bfi.org.uk/interviews/leila-wolves-40th-anniversary-heiny-srour-her-time-travelling-tale-arab-womanhood
4. Cited in Viviane Saglier, ‘Decolonization, Disenchantment, and Arab Feminist Genealogies of Worldmaking’. Feminist Media Histories, 8 (1), 2022, 72–101.
5. Additional source: Terri Ginsberg, ‘Feminist Auratics and the Radical Re-envisioning of Revolutionary Militancy’ in Films of Arab Loutfi and Heiny Srour, Springer International Publishing AG, 2021, (pp. 19–49).
It is the end of the summer of 1982, the seventh year of the war in Lebanon, Israel has invaded on 6 June, and a young woman, Leila (Nabila Zeituni), sits in the living room of her bourgeois family’s apartment in Beirut. The sound of the bombardments is a macabre soundtrack, and the mirror she holds in her hands is a magic device that takes her in an imaginative journey across time, where the first stop is her own future.
She is now a grandmother, surrounded by daughters and nieces, but not much seems to have changed. Time is still marked by war and patriarchy. The Leila of 1982 wonders: ‘Will I become like that?’ The desolate tone in her voice suggests that this is not her wish.
With the power characterising her filmic narrative style, a masterful and unique blend of documentation and surrealism, Heiny Srour unapologetically discloses, with the first scene of Leila and the Wolves, the poetics of a script that in 1979 was enthusiastically welcomed by the Agence de Coopération Culturelle et Technique (ACCT, Agency of Cultural and Technical Cooperation), which had been established in 1970 at Niamei, Niger, upon the initiative of the then President of Senegal, Léopold Senghor, to bring together twenty-one francophone states. Especially enthusiastic was the then Chair of the selection committee, Tahar Cheriaa, who had founded the Carthage Film Festival, the first Pan-African and Pan-Arab film festival, in 1966. Since then he was considered a father figure for young Arab and African filmmakers of the Tricontinental era (1). No wonder that Leila and the Wolves, shot amidst the intense danger of active war zones in Lebanon and Syria in the early 1980s, after a struggle to secure funding, received multiple awards after its first screenings in 1984. Today, the film is considered Srour’s masterpiece; it is both a deep appraisal of the intertwining colonial histories of Palestine and Lebanon, and a sharp critique of the erasure of women’s participation in the resistance movements.
Srour takes neither a pedagogical nor a pedantic approach to the story she narrates. To achieve that, the main character, Leila, takes the viewer on a transtemporal journey across ‘the land where the olives grow’, as the eldest women in the film refer to the Bilad al-Sham (The Land of the Orient, the name the region of Palestine, Lebanon and Syria was known by in pre-colonial times). The journey spans from the early twentieth century to the mid-1980s in the middle of the Lebanese war.
Reminiscent of the structure of some of the classics of Arabic literature – the mosaic – where the same characters appear across multiple short stories which are contained within a frame story. Leila and her partner Rafiq (Rafiq Ali Ahmed) travel across the 1920s uprisings against the British mandate in Palestine, the Palestinian anti-colonial revolts of 1936-39, the Palestinian Nakba of 1948 and proclamation of the State of Israel, the new exodus of Palestinians following the 1967 Six Day War, the militarisation of the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon that followed the Black September expulsion of Palestinians from Jordan in 1970, and through the first seven years of the Lebanese war. Significantly, Srour does not use either “civil war” (as in international scholarship), or ahdath/évènements (“events” in vernacular Lebanese) to describe the Lebanese ordeal between 1975 and 1990.
By naming it just a ‘war,’ Sroury challenges both the imperial narrative, which omits the responsibility of regional and international actors in it, and also the over-emphasis on “sectarianism”, instead of acknowledging the socio-economic roots of the war. She also addressed the amnesia with which Lebanese society decided to deal with the trauma, by refusing to even name it. Moreover, the early 1980s were not marked only by war in Lebanon. These were also the times when women’s studies were becoming established as an academic field across the Middle East region, with the pioneering works produced by feminist historians specialising in the study of the Arab world that were already circulating among the major Arab, American, British and European universities. Srour, a graduate from the Saint Joseph University of Beirut and The Sorbonne, had certainly been exposed to feminist scholarship. As she declared in an interview, she was inspired by the book by Khadijeh Al-Habashneh (known also under her husband’s name, Abu Ali), a scholar, psychologist, filmmaker, and co-founder of the Palestinian Film Unit in Beirut, about Palestinian women’s political activism in the late 1960s (2) and also by family histories and by stories she read in the letters published by Lebanese newspapers and told by Lebanese women friends (3).When she wrote Leila and the Wolves, Srour was not new to the feminist research methodologies, which she had already adopted when she filmed The Hour of Liberation (1974), a feature about the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf (PFLOAG), in which she documented the centrality that this movement acknowledged to women’s militancy and their liberation.
If The Hour of Liberation, through the celebration of the approach to revolution of the PFLOAG, was an insider’s critique of the attitude of Arab nationalism and the traditionalism within the revolutionary movements, which indefinitely postponed women’s liberation “until victory,” Leila and the Wolves digs deeper into the mechanisms of history writing, reclaiming women’s space in it. Srour relies on her main character, Leila, to produce a shift in the narrative of history. In the initial months of the Lebanese war, Leila and her partner Rafiq are both in London, where Rafiq is curating an art exhibition dedicated to Palestinian history. Leila walks through it and she notices that women are not portrayed in the photos he has selected: she asks, ‘What is your problem with women? The photos you show only have men.’ Rafiq’s answer is categorical: ‘I don’t remember seeing any women. At that time, women had nothing to do with politics.’
This dialogue shifts the focus from a mere analysis of women’s suffering and heroism during war (something that has a long history in world cinema, reaching one of its peaks in Italian neorealism), to a far more feminist critique of the gendered politics of knowledge production. Some scholars have not hesitated to define it as ‘decolonial’, underlining that it transcends the anti-colonial militant practices of Third Worldist, nationalist cinema to emphasise nonlinear narratives and plural epistemologies (Saglier, 2022). Srour’s alter-ego, Leila, cannot accept this response, and she takes revenge on Rafiq. She wears the white gown that he would like her to put on for the opening of the exhibition he is curating, and she takes him in a transtemporal journey through collective memory, across lands populated by women warriors who throw boiling water at the British soldiers in Palestine in the 1920s, fake a wedding ceremony to smuggle weapons to Mount Carmel in support of the revolts of 1936-39, and are killed alongside the men in the massacre of the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin perpetrated by the Jewish Irgun militia in 1948. She observes the displaced Palestinian women refugees during the 1948 Nakba turning into trainee fighters in the refugee camps in Lebanon, and Lebanese women shooting against snipers during the war of the streets in Beirut between 1975 and 1977. For each one of these sequences, Leila appears like a ghost in her white gown, assigning to Rafiq every time a different role, from the Arab military that collaborates with the British colonialists, to the anxious uncle of a young woman who wants to join the militias; he is worried about her future reputation, more than her life.
In this film the big history, which is the history of war in Palestine and Lebanon amidst colonialism and the directly referenced consequences of the European Holocaust, intersects people’s history, and particularly the history of young women who try not to surrender to family plans to withdraw them from school in order to get them ready for marriage, and who face domestic violence and an unequal family law (which women in Lebanon have been fighting to change since the birth of the independent state in 1943, and are still fighting to ameliorate).
The experimental language and montage of the film, which covers eighty years of history from a women’s and feminist point of view, allows Srour to develop a narrative that is not simply modernist and teleological, and it questions the linearity of women’s liberation. In Leila and the Wolves, women face injustice not only in the traditional spaces dominated by family rules and religion, but also in the modern and progressive leftist and militant fields. Patriarchy intersects and transcends both spheres. Emblematic of this vision is the sequence that shows a seamstress in tears in a refugee camp in Lebanon – where women are trained to fight – before the war, in 1975. The woman is desperate because her husband, a revolutionary, has divorced her, and has taken away their five children. As it moves from the crying woman to the women fighters standing at the door of her house, the camera rests on a poster hanging at the door: ‘The Palestinian Women on the Road to Liberation.’ The contrast is mediated by the rage of a third female character on the scene, who addresses the fighters: ‘Are these the results of women’s mobilisation? Is this the liberation you wanted for women?’
Liberation and revolution do not necessarily align, and the revolution, as it has been carried on in the twentieth century, does not always happen in the best interest of women. Emancipation also comes at a high cost when the structures of patriarchy remain in place. As one of the characters in the film, an accomplished young women manager in Beirut in the early 1980s, confides to her friend: ‘Equality is exhausting!
Multiple questions lurk throughout the film, a film that inquires into the long-term effects of colonisation and multiple wars in Palestine and Lebanon through the twentieth century and does so without indulging in nationalist or mainstream revolutionary rhetoric. If colonialism and patriarchy are co-constitutive, nationalism is not a third way: as Srour says, ‘I denounce the first as an implacable enemy, and I critique the latter as a comrade concerned with a healthy resolution of what is today called “the contradiction within the people”’.(4) Leila’s transhistorical journey facing the wolves (which are both colonialism and patriarchy) seems to suggest that women face multiple layers of violence, and their erasure from history writing, is crucial to the perceived legitimacy of this violence.
At the beginning of the film, and in the exhibition that Rafiq sets up in London, only men are in the photos retrieved from the archives, while women are in the realm of orality, which is made of folklore stories and popular songs. Folklore stories and songs are the voices of the dispossessed, and they shape the collective memory, but it is the mediation of the historian that ensures that the dispossessed becomes subjects of history. This is what Heiny Srour’s intervention does. With her work, which masterfully reads the archive against the grain, finding traces of women’s history and blending archival footage and oral history with her own camerawork, Srour contributes to the feminist historians’ effort to write Palestinian and Lebanese women into the realm of history, and she draws on a methodology of storytelling that is in conversation with other women masters of “Third World Cinema”, first and foremost Assia Djebar, Selma Bakkar, Nabbeha Lotfi, Jocelyne Saab, Atteyat el-Abnoudy and, later, Arab Lutfi and Tahani Rachid. Srour deconstructs historically rooted prejudices about the relationship between women and history and particularly women and war, by rejecting both the chauvinistic narrative that women in the past had nothing to do with politics, and the maternalistic narrative that women are naturally inclined to peace. Forty years after its first screening, as the world faces a rapid escalation of both war and genocide, Leila and the Wolves remains a masterpiece that has a lot to tell its viewer, and its restoration, by France’s Centre National du Cinéma et de l’Image Animée in 2021, has proven to be a timely and perceptive decision. (5)
Notes
1. Cecilia Cenciarelli, ‘Film Notes’, Il Cinema Ritrovato, 2023 https://festival.ilcinemaritrovato.it/en/film/layla-wa-ziab/
2. Khadijeh Habashneh, Introductions about Women in Reality: The Experience of Women in the Palestinian Resistance Movement, Published by General Union of Palestinian Women, Beirut-Lebanon, 1975 (in Arabic).
3. Elhum Shakerifar and Heiny Srour, ‘Leila and the Wolves 40th anniversary: Heiny Srour on her time-travelling take of Arab womanhood’, May 2024, https://www.bfi.org.uk/interviews/leila-wolves-40th-anniversary-heiny-srour-her-time-travelling-tale-arab-womanhood
4. Cited in Viviane Saglier, ‘Decolonization, Disenchantment, and Arab Feminist Genealogies of Worldmaking’. Feminist Media Histories, 8 (1), 2022, 72–101.
5. Additional source: Terri Ginsberg, ‘Feminist Auratics and the Radical Re-envisioning of Revolutionary Militancy’ in Films of Arab Loutfi and Heiny Srour, Springer International Publishing AG, 2021, (pp. 19–49).
THE RESTORATION
Source: DCP Cinenova, UK. Cinenova is a volunteer-run organisation preserving and distributing the work of feminist film and video makers. Selected for Venice Classics 2021.
Leila and the Wolves has been restored by CNC – Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée.
The 16mm negative of Leila and the Wolves is conserved at the British Film Institute. It was scanned at the laboratories of the CNC (Paris) which carried out the digital restoration. The original magnetic sound was digitised by the British Film Institute and restored by Le Diapason.
Writer/Producer/Director: Heiny Srour; Production Companies: Leila Films, BFI, Ministère Nationale et de la Culture Française; Photography: Curtis Clark, Charlet Recors; Editor: Eva Houdova; Production Design: No’man Al Joud, Ahmed Malla, Heiny Srour; Music: Zaki Nassif, Munir Bechir
Cast: Nabila Zeitouni (Leila), Rafik Ali Ahmad, Raja Nehme, Emilia Fowad, Ferial Abillamah, Zafila Cattan, Wissal El Sayyed, Yolande Asmar, Toufic Mrad, Antoniette Negib, Mona Ramadan, Hayat Lozi, Majwa Mehdi
UK/Lebanon/France/Belgium/Netherlands/Sweden | 1984 | 90 Mins | 2K DCP | Colour | Arabic Version with English subtitles | UC 15+
Leila and the Wolves has been restored by CNC – Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée.
The 16mm negative of Leila and the Wolves is conserved at the British Film Institute. It was scanned at the laboratories of the CNC (Paris) which carried out the digital restoration. The original magnetic sound was digitised by the British Film Institute and restored by Le Diapason.
Writer/Producer/Director: Heiny Srour; Production Companies: Leila Films, BFI, Ministère Nationale et de la Culture Française; Photography: Curtis Clark, Charlet Recors; Editor: Eva Houdova; Production Design: No’man Al Joud, Ahmed Malla, Heiny Srour; Music: Zaki Nassif, Munir Bechir
Cast: Nabila Zeitouni (Leila), Rafik Ali Ahmad, Raja Nehme, Emilia Fowad, Ferial Abillamah, Zafila Cattan, Wissal El Sayyed, Yolande Asmar, Toufic Mrad, Antoniette Negib, Mona Ramadan, Hayat Lozi, Majwa Mehdi
UK/Lebanon/France/Belgium/Netherlands/Sweden | 1984 | 90 Mins | 2K DCP | Colour | Arabic Version with English subtitles | UC 15+