Leila and the Wolves — Heiny Srour [Review]

The most experimental regional cinema in the world might belong to the Arab Levant. As a region destabilized by a non-Indigenous oppressive neighbor for virtually the entire lifetime of cinema as an art form, moving pictures have always been an integral form of resistance in the region. Leila and the Wolves, a 1984 film by the Lebanese Jewish feminist Heiny Srour, recently restored by the French National Cinema Center and currently touring North America, holds a special place within that tradition of boundary-pushing Leftist filmmaking from the Arab Levant.

Srour’s 1974 documentary about the Dhofar Rebellion, The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived, was the first ever film directed by an Arab woman to be featured at the Cannes Film Festival. It remains one of the only documentaries with original footage about the conflict. She would go on to make the genre-liberated Leila and the Wolves, filmed in an active war zone, focusing on the lives of women in Lebanon and Palestine from the 1930s through the 1980s (and beyond). She impossibly straddles both cinéma vérité and Federico Fellini in her mission to correct the narrative of women’s involvement in the Leftist Arabic political movements of the 20th century. The former was an expected influence for a student of social anthropology at the institution where Jean Rouch, one of cinéma vérité’s intellectual grandfathers, taught; the latter is natural in a completely different way, as a forerunner in narrative liberation.

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