Movie: Leila and the Wolves at the Beacon

Forty years ago, this landmark film by Lebanese director Heiny Srour (THE HOUR OF LIBERATION HAS ARRIVED) centred the less visible stories and histories of women’s resistance in Lebanon and Palestine through an audacious feminist rewriting. Now re-emerging in a new restoration, LEILA AND THE WOLVES revolves around the eponymous Leila (Nabila Zeitouni), a London-based Lebanese woman who, in pondering her future within the limits of the patriarchal imagination, begins to question the long-hidden roles that women have had in Arab history, including how they entwine with the Palestinian resistance movement.

A photography exhibition, organised by a male friend and chronicling the Palestinian struggle, intrigues Leila further. When she questions why there are only photographs of men, he responds casually that women simply weren’t present. Leila’s visceral rejection of this response sets her on a time-travelling journey from the early 1900s to the 1980s, as well as into her own future – or what it will be like if she merely accepts women’s lack of historical agency.

LEILA AND THE WOLVES weaves together fictional drama, memory, myth and archival footage (from sources ranging from the films of Palestinian director Mai Masri to the archives of UNRWA and the Imperial War Museum) to conjure images of active, activist and defiant women – a restitution of sorts, which reverberates around the world. In an interview from 2020, the filmmaker says: “Nowadays, LEILA is travelling the world again, more relevant than ever; my unconscious and the collective unconscious of the women of the Middle East spoke together throughout the extreme conditions of making this film.”

“Heiny Srour’s LEILA AND THE WOLVES is a film of monumental resolve and ambition, determined to address the contradictions within the anti-colonial struggle. With a single actress playing multiple characters in different historical moments, the film dispenses with teleological linearity to emphasize the recurrence of oppression and the consequent need for constant and multifarious opposition. Its restored relevance is not only thematic but methodological: here’s a film that defiantly disregards any moralist binary of good versus evil, us versus them, to champion the immense and composite task that is liberation from all shackles, wherever and whomever we are.” – Celluloid Liberation Front