LEILA AND THE WOLVES (Heiny Srour 2024)

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HEINY SROUR: LEILA AND THE WOLVES (1984) AND THE HOUR OF LIBERATION HAS ARRIVED (1974)

Arab women in war, and the Gulf struggle, two remarkable films

Ten years after Heiny Srour made history at Cannes with her debut The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived, which made her the first Arab woman to direct a movie shown at the festival, she released this film about Arab women warriors both visible and behind the scene in history throughout the past half century both in Palestine and in Lebanon. This is a wide-ranging history of Arab women fighting against British and Zionist colonialism, but also against male chauvinism.

For the film's fortieth anniversary, the restoration will be shown in the US by BAM along with Srour's first film and she will be present for the debut. Thanks to distributor Several Futures. Srour, who is based in Paris, will be in attendance for the week-long run at BAM Cinemas.

It was filmed in often treacherous areas and the filming lasted seven years.In the film, the protagonist Leila (Nabila Zeitouni), a modern Lebanese woman living in London, who visits a photo exhibit, subsequently time-travels through the 1900s to the 1980s, with each trip focusing on the centrality of women in Palestinian and Lebanese resistance movements, sometimes overtly fighting in combat with men, often helping behind the scenes.

The ingenuity and complexity of this film are mind-boggling, though the overall effect ultimately is wearying and confusing. A detailed historical knowledge of Palestine and Lebanon might be helpful. Some staged sequences may refer to specific conflicts but there are no voiceovers or titles to inform us of that. A lot is wasted because the editing doesn't relate large sequences in a clear or dramatic way. It's hard to enjoy a film when you're lost.

It's notable that the film constantly interweaves its own staged sequences with actual period clips, sometimes seamlessly, often not. It's jarring, and seems somehow sacriligious, to realize that one clip shows someone pretending to die and the next shows someone really dying.

The best staged sequences are ironic ones where women make use of their traditional roles where both Arab and western men write them off as just mindless housewives who spend all day chopping vegetables or doing the laundry, which, it's pointed out, they're sentenced to by male-dominated Arab society. And then a whole group of women pretending to be on their way to a traditional wedding, singing and wailing and parading bundles of stuff right by enemy guards, are actually carrying weapons and bullets. They insert long bullets into lumps of pastry. All this would be pretty risky. But aren't the endmy guards kind of dumb not to stop them and search their bundles? Yet so it has happened.

A recurrent image is a shot of ten women all covered in black burqas ranged around on a beach. The film keeps coming back to them. Finally a group of men run down to swim in bathing suits, and after they come out of the water, the women pull some of the cloth away from their faces and get up and pull up their dresses and walk into the waterk, gingerly enjoying a dip, showing a lot of pretty white leg.

All this is in Lebanese Arabic, and there are oddly charming scenes of posh traditional Lebanese interiors with huge matching sets of furniture that are almost more dramatic than the actors sitting there sipping tea and coffee.

Also available in a restored print now is Srour's 1974 film, L'Heure de la libération est arrivée/The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived, which debuted at Cannes Critics' Week that year. Providing initial background, at first this just looks like a dull educational film, but then it quickly morphs into a work of vivid and riveting reportage. This is an even more extraordinary film for its intimate direct footage of young revolutionaries of all ages and both sexes in the Gulf. Young boys are seen acquiring literacy out of doors, and teenage boys tilling the soil wearing long rifles strung across their backs. Srour is there among them, and there are young women soldiers just like the men, with sparkling eyes, who otherwise might have been squatting in robes cooking and making tea and instead are firing rockets.

Srour is covering the war of national liberation of the people of Dhofar and Oman under the leadership of PFLOAG, the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Arabicn Gulf. PRLOAG, organized in 1968, was a Marxist-Leninist organization that sought to establish a "democratic people's republic" in Oman and expel British forces. Sometimes the fervor is thrilling, and sometimes it is rather chilling. This film as a real-world tract on revolt is almost on a par with Gino Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers. Srour's courage and committment in making such a film are awesome. This one, unlike the Lebanese Arabic Leila and the Wolves, is in modern standard Arabic.

Certainly for all that Leila's occasional longeurs and lack of historical guidelines may somewhat limit accesibility to the general audience, it's a fasciating artifact for students of modern Arab and Lebanese history and Arabic film, and Hour of Liberation is remarkable coverage of the early revolutionary movement in the Gulf. There is remarkable filmmaking here, and these two films can be an inspiration to women filmmakers. With both of them, Heiny Srour established herself as an icon of Middle Eastern feminist cinema.

Leila and the Wolves ليلى و الذئاب ("Layla wa-adh-dhiyab), 93 mins., debuted at Manheim 1984 (Grand Prix) with six other festival awards. Restored 2024 by CNC from its 16mm film original preserved by BFI, it was screened as the closing night of the Open City Documentary Festival in London on its fortieth anniversary in 2024. With clear, new, explanatory English subtitles. See IndieWire. The film premieres Mar. 14 at BAM Cinemas, followed by a rollout of screenings in select U.S. and Canadian cities including Toronto's TIFF Theatre on Apr. 5, Spacy in Dallas on Apr. 7, Vancouver's Cinematheque on Apr. 11, 13, and 26, and the Cleveland Institute of Art on May 4. L'Heure de la libération est arrivée ساعة التحرير دقت, 62 mins., debuted in France Nov. 6, 1974, and was rereleased there Apr. 6l, 2016, and shown at Film Forum, New York Jun. 3, 2019.

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