For its first-ever US theatrical release, Lebanese filmmaker Heiny Srour’s visionary feminist work Leila and the Wolves receives a new 40th anniversary restoration – a film which explores the overlooked or forgotten roles of Arab women in past conflicts.
Originally filmed in 1980-81 and with several additional years waiting for the film to be completed, Leila and the Wolves was first released in 1984 and is now being rereleased – following restoration – after more than 40 years. This influential film is the work of Heiny Srour, a filmmaker born and raised in Beirut, Lebanon into a Jewish family.
Combining archive film, dramatisations and fantasy sequences, and leaping through various points of time, the film opens in a Beirut under siege, with women gathering in a family home, surrounding the matriarch. She is played by Nabila Zeitouni, who takes on several roles throughout the runtime. As the granddaughters and nieces pay their respects, the elderly woman makes it clear that the young women should be married by now, or have children, or have more children, or have boys, not girls. It’s not easy to be a woman in 1980s Beirut.
Jumping back in time a few years, Zeitouni plays a different character who works in a London art gallery; we hear her boyfriend (Rafik Ali Ahmad) commenting that in the past, women had nothing to do with politics in Lebanon. This is the jump off point for a collection of vignettes which debunk this male-centric view of history, all of which feature Zeitouni and Ahmad in various roles.
Using a tableau of sequences which all shed light on various generally unrecognised (or at least, unremembered) actions taken by women throughout years of conflict in Lebanon and Palestine, Heiny Srour gives generations of women back their voices, and highlights the never-changing environment of male supremacy both in Palestine and in Lebanon.
We see women warding off British soldiers from their balconies, then comforting a young woman whose father has refused to allow her to continue going to school. An unwilling bride prepares for her wedding, which the women of the village use as a cover for delivering ammunition and food to their revolutionary menfolk. A group of women completely covered in black clothing, with only their eyes visible, sit on a baking beach in silence, while men and boys get to splash around in the sea right in front of them. There is no specific narrative, but it’s clear that history will always repeat itself in one way or another, and the contribution of women will continue to be downplayed or forgotten, while the male voices are always the strongest.
It’s fascinating to realise that the ideas contained within a film made in the early 1980s, before many of those about to watch it for the first time were born, may not look that different if it were made today. Heiny Srour’s tapestry of a film ensures that the memories of Middle Eastern women will not be forgotten lightly.
For those in the vicinity of any of the US or Canadian screenings, this mesmerising film deserves your time.