La Transversale : Time Travelling

Leila and the Wolves

Leila et les loups

Heiny Srour

1984
Lebanon / France
1h30
Fiction
Col.
VOSTF - 16mm
photo Leila et les loups

Leila, an exiled curator preparing an exhibition of Palestinian photography, serves as a launching pad for the film’s challenge to erasures of Arab women from history. Leila looks to re-centre women in Arab history, yet she refuses to mimic a masculinised discourse of heroism in doing so. Leila’s reflections gradually see this central character multiply and migrate as she transcends a series of female roles, each of which reveal an element of social oppression, sustain a call for resistance.

As bold politically as it is aesthetically, Leila and the Wolves is a signal work in the history of feminist filmmaking in the Middle East.
Using a compelling narrative structure, Srour examines roles played by Palestinian and Lebanese women in their national struggles. Of this pursuit of new narrative forms, Srour has commented: “Those of us from the third world have to reject the idea of film narration based on the 19th century bourgeois novels with its commitment to harmony. Our societies have been too lacerated and fractured by colonial power to fit into those neat scenarios.”

From http://www.barbican.org.uk
Cast
Nadia Zeitouni, Rafic Ali Ahmed
Screenplay
Heiny Srour
Photography
Curtis Clark, Charlet Recors
Sound
Eddy Tise, John Anderton, Sabah Jabbour, Emile Saade, Henri Morelle
Music
Munir Bechir
Editing
Eva Houdova
Production
Leila Films

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