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Ideology Ruled Her Camera

On Heiny Srour’s defeat-conscious cinema of Arab struggle Still from Leila and the Wolves(1984), dir. Heiny Srour. | CNC

In September 1982, while withdrawing from Beirut, Israeli military forces plundered the research center of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Israel had sought to eradicate the group through its illegal invasion of Lebanon in June of that year, after supporting and arming right wing factions in the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90), a conflict that is an integral part of the Palestinian question.

In the aftermath of the Nakba, thousands of Palestinians were displaced to Lebanon as refugees, where they lived as noncitizens with limited rights. (Their numbers grew to approximately 270,000 in 2024.) Lebanon subsequently became an operation base for the PLO, as well as a space where Palestinian knowledge could be disseminated in “Israel’s backyard,” which effectively entangled the fates of Palestine and Lebanon for the foreseeable future—especially given Israel’s insatiable desire for expansion and control of the entire region.

In 1982, Israeli troops not only took away the PLO’s entire library of 25,000 volumes in Arabic, English, and Hebrew, but also its vast Palestinian film archive. This act was an echo of 1948, when thousands of photographs, films, and musical recordings were either destroyed or seized by the Israeli military, rendering the Palestinian archive largely inaccessible. The systematic destruction of archives and institutions of knowledge production remains a constitutive element of Israel’s current genocidal assault on Gaza. The bombing and demolition of universities, libraries, and cultural centers is an essential component of the settler colony’s attempt to obliterate the memory of Palestine, their effort to destroy Palestinian resistance by destroying any documentation of it.

In 1984, two years after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Lebanese director Heiny Srour released her second and only feature film, Leila and the Wolves, which dramatizes the intricate political entanglements between Palestine and Lebanon through the lens of women’s resistance, struggle, and participation in national liberation projects. Unlike many other works of this kind, Srour’s film has survived. Forty years later, amid a historic new phase of Israeli aggression wreaking havoc in the region, Leila and the Wolveswas aptly restored by France’s Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée and has been screening in countries around the world in honor of its anniversary. As of May 1, it is available to stream on the Criterion Channel.

Hailing from an Arab Jewish family, Srour was a Marxist who studied sociology in Lebanon. She then moved to France to study at the Sorbonne, where she was influenced by Jean Rouch to become part of a milieu of filmmakers who used film in the service of politicking. Rouch had developed a style of documentary filmmaking referred to as cinéma vérité, which took a more naturalistic and improvisatory approach. This freer style suited Srour: she was drawn to film not for film’s sake but as a tool, one that could serve political purposes and change or cement public perception. Ideology ruled the camera for her.

Srour was also influenced by artistic movements closer to home. She emerged as a filmmaker after Egypt’s golden age as the cultural hegemon of the Arab world had ended. A new generation of directors and filmmakers were trying to find an alternative path, which emerged in Lebanon in 1975, in what was called the “new Lebanese cinema” or “progressive Arab cinema.” It was led by young filmmakers who were not necessarily formally trained, and their work was characterized by a combination of documentary and fiction. These films were focused on the homeland and the collective—in contrast to the dominant trend in today’s political cinema, in which filmmakers often abstract their relationship to their subject matter, or focus on a singular lived experience at the expense of the context surrounding it.

Filmed over six years in various locations, including in Syria and Lebanon during the Lebanese Civil War, Leila and the Wolves comprises a rich tapestry of archival footage mixed with fictional scenes that are largely based on real-life events. Making it was a challenge: throughout filming, Srour persevered in wrangling financial backing from France, Sweden, Britain, Belgium, Holland and Lebanon, but production halted twice due to lack of funds. “Why should we give British taxpayers’ money to an Arab filmmaker?” she was once asked at a BFI production board meeting. But Srour continued to fight for the relevance of the film.

From the very first shot, in which the protagonist Leila is introduced, wandering through landscapes of the Levante that are purposefully left unidentified, Srour’s editorial line is laid bare to the viewer. There is no veneer of objectivity. Leila and the Wolvesis a testament to resistance that serves a political purpose—namely, to reject victimization and seize control over the task of narration, putting it back into the hands of the revolutionary subject at the same moment the enemy was seeking to dismantle that revolution. Central to the film, and to Srour’s entire oeuvre, is that women have always been integral to armed resistance struggles and political organizing for Palestine. This centrality is so naturalized that it does not always call attention to itself as a theme; rather, women arethe story and the point of departure for all of the other ideas Srour explores.

In the film, Leila, played by Nabila Zeitouni (who portrays several other characters in the film), is curating a photography exhibition on historical Palestine in London. When her partner Rafiq tells her that he does not believe women were invested in politics “back in the day,” Leila takes him on several excursions into the past, demonstrating to both Rafiq and the viewer the essential role women have played in Palestinian and Lebanese revolutionary history, in episodes dating back to before the Nakba.

We see Palestinian women throwing plant pots and pans of water on British troops, as well as searching for ammunition, smuggling arms, and forging bullets on rocks during the Palestinian revolt of 1936–39. These women must still maintain their domestic responsibilities of house upkeep for when the revolutionary men return, yet they are not merely helpmeets; it is their struggle too, one they carry on even while enduring the brutal realities of patriarchy in a colonized society. A haunting scene depicts the Deir Yassin massacre—one of the most notorious massacres of 1948, when Zionist paramilitaries attacked the village of Deir Yassin near Jerusalem, then part of Mandatory Palestine, killing at least 107 Palestinian Arab villagers. Srour shows a woman urging the villagers to fight and even attempting to assassinate a member of the Zionist militia herself, before she is eventually shot. This fictionalized reenactment illuminates how Srour has chosen to frame her film: through the lens of revolutionary women. In reality, of course, the massacre was deadly for all Palestinians, men, women, and children alike.

The second part of the film takes place during the Lebanese Civil War. We see Palestinian women in refugee camps and Lebanese women who leave their family to take up arms and join the ranks of men: a defiant action in a society that still assigned certain roles to women. A striking scene of wedding preparations speaks to the dual realities that these women inhabited: as the bride is being beautified, the women around her are hiding weapons within the wedding supplies to prepare for transportation. Their actions epitomize the clandestine life of resistance that both women and men facing the sharpest edge of imperialism are made to lead.

Interspersed in the latter half of the film is the striking and purposefully uncomfortable shot depicted on the Leila and the Wolves’ poster: a semicircle of burka-clad women sit on a beach facing Leila, who stands unveiled in a white dress in their midst. For an Arab female viewer like myself, this image is complicated: I am uneasy over how the film could be perceived by Western audiences, who already have a fixed narrative about the patriarchal nature of Middle Eastern societies, differentiating them from their own. I worry, too, about the ways that female autonomy has too often been reduced to women’s sartorial decisions rather than other forms of material liberation. We should not discount the reality of the Islamic nature of the resistance in Palestine and beyond. Especially in the latest Israeli assault on Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, and Lebanon, we have seen women both veiled and unveiled stand defiantly against the Zionist entity and face martyrdom, injury, and loss of loved ones in return.

That being said, I don’t wish to project a relationship between how this film might be received in the West and the artist’s own political motive. The awkwardness of those scenes with Leila on the beach is offset by the fact that the film was clearly made by a director who moves with, and is part and parcel of, the struggle for liberation that these women are undertaking. The film’s purpose is revolutionary agitation rather than appealing to a Western gaze, and as such, her subjects are neither idealized nor victimized. Leila and the Wolvesis also clearly a critique from within, nodding to the fact that while the main contradiction in the region is imperialism, Srour was willing to address what needed to be done to combat the liberation movement’s internal weaknesses, including the expectations placed on women. 

That is not to deny colonized men their liberation struggle. If anything, the recent brutalization of Palestine has shown us how much dehumanization heroic Palestinian men face at the hands of not only Israel but the entire international community, who, in their repeated casualty figures, render women and children as the only demographics deserving of life and freedom. Their experience, such as that of the Palestinian detainee whose gang rape by guards at the notorious Sde Teiman prison was caught on video last August, demonstrates that racialized men also experience gender-based violence. Leila and the Wolves, while attempting to show the different ways colonial violence affects understudied subjects of history, is a fictionalized depiction of historical events which dramatizes a perceived problem for Srour—not a documentary. It is important to remember that the treatment of women in the film is an interpretation, not necessarily indicative of how women actually experienced these moments. 

Srour’s particular perspective raised questions about her film’s intentions. She preempted critiques that she was pedestalizing the suffering of women at the expense of men who also faced imperialist violence, or unfairly singling out the attitudes of men within the resistance movement, in a 1976 op-ed where she clarified her position:

Why is there no talk about the misogyny and anti-feminism of the King of Saudi Arabia or the CIA, for example? Why focus the attacks mainly on those who are on the right side?

Answer: because I don’t expect anything good from the CIA or the King of Saudi Arabia. But I do expect a lot from those who are fighting for a better world. Unlike bourgeois feminists, I don’t gloat when I see that a liberation movement or a left-wing party is not feminist. It saddens me, and it hurts me deeply. But not everything is on the same level for me. The privileged—imperialist, feudal or bourgeois—remain my main enemies, because class society, with its inevitable oppressor/oppressed tandem, happens to be the key component of women’s oppression. So, imperialism and a non-feminist national liberation movement, for example, are not the same to me. I denounce the first as an implacable enemy, and I criticize the latter as a comrade concerned with a healthy resolution of what is today called “the contradictions within the people.” My anti-imperialist vigilance, therefore, recommends me to crush the snake that has entered the house.

Forty years after it was originally released, Leila and the Wolvesstill resonates with no less urgency, as Palestinian and Lebanese women continue to be martyred, widowed, imprisoned, and orphaned, yet still remain resolute in their steadfastness. As Nadia Yahlom puts it, these women “resist today as women always have in history, as citizens of a country wiped off the map and one half of a people who refuse to die but also as all women of the world who suffer double oppression.” 

Depicting the resistance to this double oppression is Srour’s forte. For her first documentary film, TheHour of Liberation Has Arrived (1974),Srour, disillusioned with the Naksa—the catastrophe of the 1967 loss of Arab armies led by Egypt against Israel, and the shattering of the Pan-Arab dream—had traveled to Oman. She was seeking the one revolution in the Arab world that still seemed to be successful at the time: the Dhofar revolution against the British-backed Omani sultan. While completing a PhD, Srour had learned about the Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman (PFLOAG), the Marxist and Arab nationalist party at the vanguard of the Dhofar revolution, and she was struck by its treatment of women in particular, who were equal partners in the movement. Srour filmed what would become the most extensive documentation of this episode in Arab revolutionary history. The footage was obtained after three months of arduous labor, during which Srour hiked eight hundred kilometers from the South Yemeni border to the revolutionary areas in Dhofar.

That Srour became the first female Arab filmmaker to show at the Cannes Film Festival was not the only outcome of TheHour of Liberation Has Arrived. She was able to materially contribute to PFLOAG’s efforts, as her film gave the movement a higher profile and, according to Srour,  inspired audiences all over the world to donate both funds and medicine for their cause. She also managed to immortalize a different type of revolutionary fighter: the fatigue-wearing, young Dhofari woman, carrying a kalashnikov. One such fighter, interviewed in the documentary, says, “Women will be freed only through a protracted people’s war. She is oppressed by so many things, first by imperialism like men, then her father sells her to a husband who oppresses her in turn, so does the family and the tribe. Formerly women couldn’t move freely, but since the revolution, we realized that this isn’t in our benefit. I’ll no longer allow my family and tribe to paralyze me or keep me down. I take part in all activities of the revolution.” This is the framework through which Srour would later present Leila and the Wolves, a resistance film that puts women at its heart, but one that lacks some of the clarity of Srour’s earlier documentary, which is laser focused on the imperative to confront imperialism above all.

Srour’s dedication to political art extended beyond just her practice as a filmmaker. Resistance music is a central feature in both The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived andLeila and the Wolves, and her interest in it also prompted her to travel to Cairo to interview the legendary musician Sheikh Imam. That trip resulted in the short film The Singing Sheikh (1991), which stands out as Srour’s only film without women as its subject matter, and also as some of the rarest footage of the beloved Egyptian singer whose political songs permeated the Arab world as the soundtrack for those fighting for self-determination. Yet for all these superficial differences, what remains constant in her work is the centrality of Arab struggle and her attempts to bring incredible feats of resistance from the region to the world, drawing a Western audience without soliciting their approval.

The Pan-Arab sentiment of the 1950s to 1970s was kept alive in Leila and the Wolvesthrough the blurring of the line between Palestinian and Lebanese women, who are shown as bound together in their political and social realities and experiences. Their lives are interwoven and steeped in anti-colonial struggle. In what is considered now a post-1967 Arab Cinema manifesto, “New Realism in Arab Cinema: the Defeat-Conscious Cinema,” Tunisian film director Nouri Bouzid argued that the Naksa

brought into question all belief systems and ideologies this leaving the Arab intellectual including the Arab filmmaker, endeavoring for their creative work to emerge against a backdrop of failure and disintegration. The post-’67 Arab filmmaker has to confront several urgent questions. Is it possible to produce creative work in the wake of defeat? If so, what would be the aesthetic and political characteristics of such work, and how would it be able to tackle national and transnational disintegration, disenchantment and shame relocating across generations and exempting no Arab nation?

The answer was of course to be found in the milieu of a new generation of realist filmmakers of which Srour was a part, who developed an ethics of responsibility for the defeat that befell the Arab world. Some within today’s movement for the liberation of Palestine have criticized Srour’s public statements about the last eighteen months of genocidal Israeli violence. But regardless of her personal opinions, her filmmaking practice captured a significant moment in Arab cultural production and political praxis. If Srour’s is a defeat-conscious cinema, it’s one focused on revolutionary potential and aimed in theory and in practice to highlight it.