Leila and the Wolves 40th anniversary: Heiny Srour on her time-travelling tale of Arab womanhood

Forty years ago, a landmark film by Lebanese director Heiny Srour centred the less visible stories and histories of women in Lebanon and Palestine through an audacious feminist rewriting. Now re-emerging in a new restoration, Leila and the Wolves (1984) 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 Lebanese history, including how they entwine with the Palestinian resistance movement.

A photography exhibition at UCL, organised by a male friend and chronicling the Palestinian struggle, intrigues her 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. 

Re-enactments and archive footage (from sources ranging from the films of Palestinian director Mai Masri to the archives of UNRWA and the Imperial War Museum) intertwine to conjure images of active, activist and defiant women – a restitution of sorts, which reverberated around the world upon the film’s release. The restoration of Leila and the Wolves by France’s Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée was selected for the Venice Classics strand at the Venice Film Festival in 2021 and is distributed in the UK by Cinenova, the UK-based voluntarily-run feminist film collective, picking up the mantle from their predecessor organisation Cinema of Women, the film’s original UK distributors.

The film’s introductory lines position it as “a film based on true stories in collective memory”. How did these stories come to be passed down and collected?

Heiny Srour: I didn’t invent anything. Regarding the Palestinian part, I based the 1920s, 30s and 40s sequences on the valuable book by Khadijah Abu Ali concerning the history of Palestinian women. I added some details from my own family: my mother was taken out of primary school, and I nearly suffered the same fate after the age of 15, despite my excellent academic results. Up to doing my PhD at the Sorbonne, I had to struggle at every stage of my life to escape arranged marriages. I had to lie to my family and work to pay for my university studies in order to continue my education. This was a widespread social phenomenon common to most Oriental women. 

The fake Palestinian marriage in the film was based on information from Samir Nimr, an Iraqi who worked at the Palestine Film Unit of the PLO. The Lebanese stories are all true: some came from the readers’ letters in the daily newspaper L’Orient-Le Jour [French-language daily newspaper in Lebanon] during the Lebanese civil war. Other stories were told by my friend the prominent Lebanese writer Raja Nehme, or another writer from my Arab Women London Group, May Ghoussoub, who lost an eye during the civil war.

The film was co-produced internationally, including funding from the BFI. How was it pieced together between shoots in Syria, Lebanon and the UK, and over such a long period of time?

Srour: The script was written in three weeks instead of the usual six months to two years. Writing in haste prevented the censorship of rationality. It enabled the unconscious to stand high and see far. The unconscious ignores the immediate reality and acts in a presageful, ominous manner. It’s the voice of the collective memory.

It was written in 1979, but, due to financial problems, the film was completed only in 1984. Far too much of my time and energy went to fundraising. Shooting under the bullets of the Lebanese civil war and the brewing Syrian civil war complicated everything. 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. 

Syria’s locations were essential for the Palestinian part as Palestine was part of Great Syria before the Sykes-Picot Agreement. In Lebanon, the civil war made everything even more difficult. Even in seemingly easy scenes where you see no human beings, my cameraman Charlet Recors nearly died by a stray bullet, because shooting after sunset is very dangerous in Beirut. In the closing scene, filmed in the destroyed souks of Beirut, we had to pay the snipers to save our lives and the footage.

Much like in your first film The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived (1974), I’m struck by the presence of song in Leila and the Wolves as a powerful tool of oral history, or inscribing memory. You also later made a film about Sheikh Imam (The Singing Sheikh, 1991). I would love to hear your reflections on song and melody as a storytelling tool. As the film goes on, song is replaced by the jarring sound of bullets.

Srour: I favour heritage songs and music because they are the alternative media of the underprivileged. I use visual as well as musical leitmotifs because they give voice to the collective memory. For example, the traditional ‘Dalouna’ is used in the fake marriage scene but also in a cemetery where mothers mourn their daughters who were martyred in the spring of their lives. Since The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived up to my film on Sheikh Imam, songs are used to comment on or represent historical events.

Leila’s gaze at her reflection in the mirror is the leap into the future that brings her to understand how to break the tradition of limited expectations placed on women. Can you speak to the importance of inscribing this into the narrative as the key thread to unlock the film’s historical recollections?

Srour: Throughout the film, throughout history, women left their traditional roles in moments of historical change. They got involved in politics, consciously or not, but went back to their traditional roles when they were not needed anymore. But as we got closer to modern times they became more conscious of their importance and refused to be just used. 

Leila is emblematic of a generation who is struggling consciously to rhyme braininess with femininity. It was new in Arab cinema. Even in world cinema, so far, no attempt has been made to embrace 80 years of history from a female and feminist point of view. History is cyclical and often burdensome. The tragedy of the human condition, and the tragedy of women even more so, is that we measure changes on the short scale of a human life, whereas lasting social changes take centuries.

Leila and the Wolves plays at the ICA from 3 May.