Leila and the Wolves: Feminism at the helm of liberation

In her manifesto, Woman, Arab and… Filmmaker, Srour states, “Imperialism and a non-feminist national liberation movement are not the same to me. I denounce the first as an implacable enemy, and I criticise the latter as a comrade concerned with a healthy resolution of what is today called ‘the contradictions within the people’.” 

Born of an secular Arab Jewish background and an ardent Marxist since the age of sixteen, Lebanese director Heiny Srour came to cinema disillusioned with the Arab left and the national liberation movements that emerged in the 1960s and 70s. As a doctoral student, Srour was uniquely attuned to the realities of liberation movements failing to address gendered inequalities – a failure that would infiitrate into the cinema that developed in concert with these movements. Influenced by the teachings of cinéma vérité filmmaking style, which leaned into an observational and realist documentary appoarch and Third World’s Cinema’s hyperfocus on the liberation struggles of the marginalized, Srour’s lens would seek to shine a light on the historically underrespresented agents of revolutionary change. 

The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived (1974), Srour’s seminal documentary about the Dhofar rebellion in Oman, captures rare footage from within the region of Oman liberated by the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf (PFLOAG), a democratic and Marxist nationalist party against the British-backed Sultan Said Bin Taimur. Srour and her team closely followed the feminist guerrilla faction of the movement, and the young women and girls in training to become freedom fighters and organisers. By excavating the militant practices of the forgotten people’s war, Srour manages to counter paternalistic representations of the oppressed. In doing so, she helped to further the Dhoafari cause by raising the profile of the Dhoafari liberation struggles. 

In an interview with film curator and researcher Olivier Hadouchi, Srour said she was drawn to the Dhofari struggle because of the People’s Liberation Army’s embrace of an explicitly feminist politics in their movement-building, centring women’s liberation as tangential to the overall goals of the movement. As she states, “I wanted to film in Dhofar because the PFLOAG, which led the struggle, was one of the rare movements in the Arab world that openly took the side of women.”

Ten years after The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived, Srour unearths the feminist organising in Lebanon and Palestine that resisted British and Zionist settler colonialism in service of the total liberation of the Arab region. In particular, her film, Leila and the Wolves (1984), recently restored courtesy of Several Futures, retraces the silenced histories of the militant contributions undertaken by Palestinian and Lebanese women throughout the 20th century. 

Opening with a fictionalised setting in an art exhibit in 1980s London, highlighting anti-colonial resistance in the Arab Levant. Leila (Nabila Zeitoni) surveys the exhibit to find that women are absent from the anti-colonial struggles being celebrated. Then Leila’s grandmother appears as a ghost to tell a different story of the Land of the Olive Groves, referring to Palestine and Lebanon, which is invaded by wolves (Zionists). “Neither fear nor veil nor the weapons in the hands of the wolves could keep [women] of the streets,” she recites. Meanwhile, when Leila asks why women are not represented in the exhibition, her boyfriend, Rafiq, says, “In those days, women had nothing to do with politics.” This scene is a conduit to the cinematic time-traveling that teleports Leila across temporal moments of women’s direct involvement in Arab resistance. 

While shot in real locations in Lebanon and Syria during the Lebanese Civil War, unlike Srour’s debut, Leila and the Wolves, transcends the cinéma vérité-style aesthetic to interweave fictional storytelling and archival footage with dramatic re-enactments and slight inflections of documentary to present a multi-generational portrait of feminist militancy. We jump from the Pre-Nabka Arab Revolt of the 1930s in Jerusalem, and the executions at Deir Yassin in 1948, to the Second Israeli invasion of Lebanon in the 1980s and the Sabra and Shatila massacres. 

Throughout these different historical moments, women are smuggling ammo and guns in food and on their person, using social festivities as cover to bypass IDF soldiers, taking up arms, or pouring boiling water and other objects from balconies on British soldiers. Ultimately, dispelling Western imperial feminist notions of the docile, subjugated veiled women, often depicting the domestic sphere and social activities as the underground front for anti-colonial organizing. This is further amplified as Srour experiments with interchangeability between the characters, some of which play multiple roles throughout the film. Palestinian and Lebanese women across time and space, spanning decades and generations, are bound by intertwined and interpersonal struggles, rupturing ongoing colonial fragmentation and manufactured borders.

Srour’s camera illuminates the multifaceted ways women in the Arab region were at the forefront of grassroots political organizing and armed resistance. Her radically feminist praxis ultimately raises the stakes of politically conscious cinema to revisit and revise the ways theory neglects to usher in transformative change for all in practice.