Heiny Srour’s Feminist Rebels

Ashley Clark, our curatorial director, explained why he felt compelled to include this film among the ten on his ballot: “Truly sui generis and genuinely radical, Leila and the Wolves is a formal feast, blending archival material with hard-hitting reenactments and imaginative fantasy sequences. I’ve never seen anything like it, and its director Heiny Srour (who also made the brilliant 1974 documentary The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived) should be far better known.”

Both films, newly restored, will screen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Leila from Friday through March 20 and The Hour from Sunday through March 19. Leila will also screen in Los Angeles on Monday, and further engagements are set for more North American cities through early May. Srour, who will turn eighty later this month, will be on hand to take part in post-screening discussions in New York and Los Angeles.

Sabzian has gathered an impressive collection of interviews with Srour and essays on her work, and the bare essentials to be gleaned are these: She was born to a Jewish family in Beirut in 1945. “My mother was an Egyptian aristocrat, my father a Lebanese of humble origin,” she told Olivier Hadouchi a few years ago. While most of the girls, and eventually, the young women her age were being yanked out of school to be married off, she was allowed to pursue her education all the way to the Sorbonne.

Along the way, in 1963, she saw Federico Fellini’s 8½ and Agnès Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 and realized, as she told Manny Shirazi in 1985, that “cinema was the language that I wanted to express myself with. I could understand that the cinema was the most powerful means, the most complete and the most total to express what you want.”

By the early 1970s, what she wanted to express was her admiration for the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf (PFLOAG), which was at the time leading the Dhofar Rebellion against the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman. PFLOAG was also “one of the rare movements in the Arab world that openly took the side of women,” Srour told Hadouchi.

The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived is a fascinating and fast-paced primer with an argument to make, namely, that the victories won in Dhofar were only feasible because women were called on to fight alongside the men in a collective effort to free newly united tribes from the colonial powers and their local collaborators who had oppressed them for centuries.

Talking to Cahiers du cinéma when The Hour screened in Cannes, Srour—the first Arab woman to have a film invited to the festival—was proud to declare that The Hour is “a partisan film at all levels. In terms of the montage as well: you can’t place images filmed on both sides of the fence in any order, and tell the viewer to choose sides; that would put oppression and freedom, injustice and justice on the same level.” The Hour “clearly takes sides, without necessarily hiding the difficulties of the struggle, without hiding the contradictions, without ultimately lapsing into triumphalism.”

Srour wrote Leila and the Wolves in three weeks in 1979. She’d caught wind of a screenwriting competition and wrote against the deadline. “Writing in haste prevented the censorship of rationality,” she told Elhum Shakerifar in an interview for the BFI last year. “It enabled the unconscious to stand high and see far.”

After Leila (Nabila Zeitouni) peers into a mirror and glimpses her own future, she snaps back to the here-and-now of the film, London in 1975. Leila is hanging an exhibition of photographs depicting decisive moments in the history of Palestinian and Lebanese resistance movements. In her mind, Leila leaps back decades, touching down to take part in a series of episodes unfolding at various points from the 1920s on through the 1970s.

The production took years to complete. “Shooting under the bullets of the Lebanese civil war and the brewing Syrian civil war complicated everything,” Srour told Shakerifar. “In a documentary, military danger is a plus and enhances the film. For a historical film with crowd scenes, set in different historical periods, each one requiring different costumes, props, guns—military danger is a mighty hindrance. We narrowly escaped death many times.”

During clashes with the British in the cities, women toss flower pots and boiling water from their balconies. In one particularly suspenseful sequence, the women of a remote village stage a fake wedding ceremony that covers their efforts to smuggle arms and ammunition to freedom fighters in the hills—right under the noses of their oppressors. In too many episodes, the women are rewarded with abuse dealt out by their returning husbands, brothers, and fathers.

“Srour goes to the roots of the Palestinian question,” writes Celluloid Liberation Front for the Notebook, “not only by retracing its historical dimensions but also by reclaiming the fundamental and fundamentally repressed role women played in the emancipatory politics of the Middle East. Unlike the critique Western feminism levels at patriarchal oppression in Arab countries, which often doubles as Islamophobic paternalism, Srour’s criticism comes from within; it is not disdainful. She is intent on the liberation of women under any type of rule, not the legitimization of one system over another.”