The British Film Institute’s restoration of Heiny Srour’s 1984 film Leila and the Wolves looks and sounds fantastic. Its current tour across the U.S.—including a local screening at Doc Films on April 13—offers audiences the opportunity to see one of the most devastatingly timely films about the history of Palestinian and Lebanese women.
In 1975 London, a straight Palestinian Lebanese couple discuss why no women are featured in a gallery show of historic photos, and the man says, “In those days, women had nothing to do with politics.” The film then takes a mystical turn as the woman, the titular Leila (Nabila Zeitouni), says, “I’ll take you with me to see,” and begins a journey through their people’s history.
We see women pouring boiling water onto British soldiers in the 20s, using a wedding to smuggle weapons in the 30s, and formally training for combat in the 70s. In each era, they battle patriarchal demands that regularly conflict with their revolutionary duty.
That the narrative travels further in time than Leila’s present-day 1975, when the Lebanese civil war broke out, seems to anticipate a future of violence beyond the film’s release. Srour intersperses archival footage in each segment, ensuring that the film never becomes a distanced dramatization and instead employing the fictional sections as a guide through the historical images.
They are images that are all too familiar today; refugee camps from 1948 and 1967 look nearly identical to the tent cities on the Gaza beaches in recent years. Yet the film’s melding of magic and realism offers a sense of hope. These women have been fighting for a hundred years, and they will keep fighting for a hundred more if they have to. 90 min.
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2025-04-11 12:15:28
