Final Rating: 4/5
In 1974, Lebanese director Heiny Srour made history by becoming the first Arab woman to get an official selection at the Cannes Film Festival with The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived. Srour’s following film, Leila and Wolves, was released in 1984. Recently, it was restored by the CNC, Centre National du Cinéma et de I’image animée, and opened in multiple cities in the United States and Canada.
The title borrows from Palestinian and Lebanese oral poetry. The Wolves is a tale about people attacked by wolves with black hearts, similar to their owners. Srour mixes documentary form, specifically the cinema verité with fictional retellings of historical moments.
The titular character, Leila (Nabila Zeitouni), is a woman who flees Lebanon from the civil war. A conflict that happened between 1975 and 1990 and affected millions of Lebanese. The introduction imagines a woman stuck in endless conflict, a feeling that most of the population had during that period. She faces a mirror and dreams of an unspecified future where she meets her granddaughters and disseminates the exact genre expectations to them. She imagines an everlasting circle of expectations of marriage, children, and the eminence of aging and not having those steps that society expects of you.
The director inflicts a reflection upon the reality of war and how it affects the dreams of younger women by defending the status quo. In this sense, Leila escaped to London, which means she is moving to a world of new possibilities. She benefits from them by organizing a photographic exposition on the revolutions in her region: the 1936-1939 Arab Revolt in Palestine and excerpts of the Lebanese civil war. In a meta effort, Leila dives and lives the photographic elements of the picture she observes.
Similarly, Srour is doing the same. She works with a hybrid structure to eternalize in the film the anti-colonial endeavors of her people. Leila finds in the exposition an opportunity to spread the word about the revolutionary combat, and the director recreates the oral stories of the region in her film to do so.
The director uses a feminist approach to canonize the participation of Arabic women in the conflicts. Each segment draws a kaleidoscope of reactions by the Palestine people from its colonization by the British Empire and later by Israel. She does not avoid a representation of violence in telling her story; in fact, she uses it to amplify an impact on the audience.
There is a difference between imagining, hearing, and understanding a repression act and seeing it portrayed on the screen. Furthermore, the director experiments with different creative choices to create a grander scope of the Palestinian and Lebanese struggle. Such poetry is through the wolves’ analogy to colonization, the cuts between varied eras, and the self-reflection of the past and future in the mirror.
The different segments empower a dimension in quantifying non-measurable suffering. The pain of having your home constantly threatened, and forty years later, it is still a reality. At the time being of this review, Palestine and Lebanon are still suffering attacks from Israel through a genocidal state policy.
The wolves with black hearts are always hungry and questioning the ownership of that land by both Palestinians and Lebanese. Even if not all of the segments engage in the same manner, where some are not coherent with the others, Srour creates an overall sense of indignation. There is a constant pain present in the film. Not always through death. Also, the taking of dreams from those women who do not see an end to the conflict.
Forty years later, Heiny Srour’s work reverberates more than ever. It converses with the ongoing genocidal effort in Gaza. Back in 1984, the director fought to canonize the efforts of the women’s fight against the colonization and settlement of the lands from Palestinians and Lebanese. Leila and the Wolves experiment with forms to spread their indignations towards the violence in the region.
Thank you to Silk Strategy and Several Futures for the screener.
