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.
Most film cataloging websites refer to Leila and the Wolves as a documentary, and that’s certainly not wrong, but it’s also not a complete description. Most documentaries don’t boast a whole lot of time travel, for starters. The film also starts with a fictional grounding, with Leila (Nabila Zeitoni) visiting a sexist photo exhibit in 1980s London celebrating Lebanese and Palestinian resistance, a scene that works as a codex for the rest of the film. “In those days, women had nothing to do with politics,” the photographer replies when Leila asks why there are no women in his photos. From here, the film sets off to correct this narrative by traveling through the 20th century and witnessing women’s involvement in the Leftist political struggle. Srour pulls from a bag of archival footage varying from Hitler rallies to horrific war footage, dramatic reenactments of true events, and a fantasy-flavored dream of what the future might hold — ignoring genre conventions as just another restriction on freedom, the very political reality her filmmaking philosophy intends to disrupt.
Archival footage has also long played a key role in the region’s formal experimentation. Most recently, 2022’s radical Reel No. 21 A.K.A. Restoring Solidarity (The Tokyo Reel) collected 20 16mm films by transnational militant filmmakers from the 1960s-1980s on the Palestinian struggle against Israel; much of the footage used there feels naturally continuous with Lelia. Both are chiefly concerned with the role of memory in the struggle for liberation, and part of that entails enshrining the past into indefatigable celluloid. Produced in Lebanon during the civil war, the past struggles reverberate into the present (of 1984) for Srour as she filmed in the war zone. “In the closing scene, filmed in the destroyed souks of Beirut, we had to pay the snipers to save our lives and the footage,” she told BFI in a recent interview. The proximity of violence to the viewfinder startles.
One of the more compelling facets of Leila is its transnational, pan-Arab solidarity, tying the stories of Lebanese and Palestinian women into one thread. The two struggles, with two distinct though interrelated antagonists, entered into at various points throughout the century, can hardly be distinguished to linguistic outsiders, even to those familiar with the region’s complex history. Only the geographical rooting of the title cards — and occasionally the presence of the enemy, like the IDF’s tactical clothes — set them apart. Sometimes such attempts relativize the disproportionate suffering of Palestinians (and, in this case, Palestinian women) at the cost of historical allusion and faux solidarity, but such a misstep feels like an impossible temptation for Srour, a brave student of the material history of the land.
We eventually come to Leila and the Wolves’ closing sequence, which is marvelous. Srour ends on a lone woman’s dance with death, something that she connects with her own Jewish culture in an interview with Reverse Shot. Leila tosses herself around the arms of nine figures clad in all-black robes and with skeletal masks. A few of the black figures wear big crosses around their necks, another few are wearing red and white fezzes on their heads, and one figure has a tallit comforting his neck. The woman bounces between these figures representing the three religions of the region like a great dance, only to have broken up this sequence piecemeal with edits of archival footage showing militaristic and machine-heavy oppression: fighter planes, tanks with the Star of David, frantic citizens carrying dead bodies, buildings exploding. The beauty of the images of the performed dance is demolished by the hideous genius of the edit. The dance never ends either. The aggressive technological push here makes everything feel so much more modern, the struggle so much more recent. The dance with death reminds us that the cycle of violence and subjugation continues — and that women too often get the worst of it. And tragically, we already know this: we have seen images just like these almost daily over the past several years on Al Jazeera, on Instagram, on TikTok, on X. The present is ever haunted.
DIRECTOR: Heiny Srour; CAST: Nabila Zeitouni, Rafic Ali Ahmad; DISTRIBUTOR: Several Futures; IN THEATERS: Mach 14; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 30 min.
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