NVICinema: Leila and the Wolves

A film by Heiny Srour | 1984 | Lebanon/ Belgium/ Netherlands/ UK | 90 min | In Arabic with English subtitles

It took Heiny Srour six years to make Leila and the Wolves, a film that uncovers the often-erased histories of women’s struggle in Palestine and Lebanon. Structured as a series of sketches, the film follows Leila (Nabila Zeitouni), a London-based Lebanese woman who begins to question the limits placed on her life and imagination. Through this, she opens a window onto the hidden roles women have played across Lebanese history and within the Palestinian resistance movement. She time-travels through the 1900s to the 1980s, wandering through real and imaginary landscapes of Lebanon and Palestine. Leila and the Wolves blends re-enactments, archival footage, and fairy-tale sequences to create a vivid testament to the lives and sociopolitical struggles of Lebanese and Palestinian women throughout the twentieth century.

About the director: Heiny Srour is a Lebanese film director and the first Arab woman to have her film Saat El Tahrir Dakkat (The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived) selected for the Cannes Film Festival. She has long advocated for women’s rights through her filmmaking, her writing, and her support for other directors. Srour studied sociology at the American University in Beirut before completing a doctorate in social anthropology at the Sorbonne. Her first film, Bread of Our Mountains (1968,16mm), was lost during the Lebanese Civil War. Her first feature, Leila and the Wolves, brings together documentary techniques with Arab mythology, creating one of the most significant feminist films in the region’s history.

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