The Unchosen:
An Interview with Heiny Srour (Leila and the Wolves)
By Marya E. Gates
Inspired by—and subverting—the One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, writer-director Heiny Srour's trailblazing 1984 film Leila and the Wolves creates an innovative mosaic of fictional narrative, archival footage, folklore, and fantasy to shine a light on the anti-imperialist and feminist liberation movements of the Lebanese and Palestinian people. In it, we follow Leila (Nabila Zeitouni) across time, witnessing the resilience and activism of Arab women throughout the 20th century. A decade earlier, Srour and her team filmed the Dhofar uprising, a democratic, Leninist guerrilla movement, against the British-backed Sultanate of Oman, aiming to highlight the feminist leanings of the group. The result was The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived (1974), a rare record of a war—and a feminist movement—that has been largely forgotten.
Born in Beirut in 1945, Lebanese filmmaker Heiny Srour studied Sociology at the French University of Beirut and Social Anthropology at the Sorbonne in Paris. While working as both a journalist and film critic, she became interested in Third World cinema and the role of Arab women in revolutions. Throughout her career, Srour has used cinema as a tool to explore themes of resistance and liberation for women across the Middle East. Ahead of the first ever U.S. release of Leila and the Wolves, which will screen for a week at BAM starting March 14, along with a new restoration of The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived, I spoke to Srour about her filmmaking process, the reception and legacy of her staunchly feminist films, and her hopes of creating cinema that can act as a bridge towards peace.
Reverse Shot: You have cited Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ and Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas’s The Hour of the Furnaces as inspirations. What about these films spoke to you when you first began making your own films?
Heiny Srour: 8 ½ liberated me from the traditional narrative of a story with a beginning, a climax, and an end. But to be honest, the reason why Leila and the Wolves is not traditional and so prophetic is the conditions under which I wrote the script. I wrote the scenario in just 3 weeks without ever going to a film school. This was 1979, and at the time I was stuck in London. The Beirut Airport closed, struggling with survival financial problems. Tahar Cheria, the great Tunisian who founded Carthage Film Festival, rang me in a fury. He showered me with hard words: ‘“It’s going to be ten years since you haven’t made a film. You are sleeping on your laurels. The scenario competition of the French-speaking countries is closing in three weeks, and I didn’t receive anything from you.” Tahar Cheria is someone I didn’t want to disappoint! He was jailed for six months by President Bourguiba for just issuing a law compelling Tunisian cinemas to screen a Tunisian short once every three months. Rank, Pathé, MPEEA, went on strike and refused to provide British, French, American films to Tunisia. They accused Tahar Cheria of a “communist plot at the head of the State” for insisting to screen a Tunisian short once every three months! People don’t realize what heavy price the people of the Third World paid, to have their films made and seen.
Once released, Tahar went to France and became head of the cultural organization of French speaking countries ACCT (now called OIF). With two young children to feed, he risked his job to give me a completion grant for The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived. The message of my film was far too radical for such a governmental organization and he dictated to me the application letter. We disguised the film as anthropological. Without Tahar’s generous grant, this film would have never been finished, nor selected at the Cannes Film Festival. Tahar must have read the script first, because he put a lot of women on the jury to maximize my chances of winning. When it was read, the Iranian women took to the streets protesting against Khomeini’s Islamic Sharia, shouting, “At the dawn of our freedom, we are deprived of freedom.” Simone de Beauvoir, Kate Millet, and Western feminists rushed to Tehran to support their Iranian sisters. A polemic raged in the French press because Simone de Beauvoir covered her head when meeting Khomeini. “We do cover our heads, don’t we, when it’s raining in Paris?” retorted the author of The Second Sex to justify no betrayal of her principles. So, the jury felt that I was prophetic and gave me the Grand Prize of 400,000 FF (over $70,000), which helped me fundraise the rest of the budget. Had I written the film under normal conditions, I might have censored myself for writing that went against the immediate reality. I would have been scared to write what would have been perceived as lies.
As for Fernando Solanas, he liberated my mind by turning his back to the system. In those days, any film in Lebanon had to be approved at the stage of the scenario, the rushes, and the final editing. Which made it impossible for me to express myself assuming someone would finance an Arab woman who never went to film school, when there were less than a handful of women directors, all European.
RS: The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived played at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival. What was that experience like for you?
HS: It was not in the official competition, which wasn't terribly official in those days, screening films presented by Ministries of Culture. Film critics found it suffocating and often deserted it to view the Critics Week, which was far more daring because directors didn’t represent a state, just themselves. Even so the cultural attaché of the Lebanese Embassy intervened to have it withdrawn at Cannes—unsuccessfully. They succeeded at the Moscow Film Festival. My film was banned in the Arab World for 45 years—and still is in most Arab countries. Bourguiba intervened in person to have it withdrawn from Carthage Film Festival, where it was poised to have won the Grand Prix. I went to Cannes without a press attaché, without a glossy press book, without a decent poster. Yet, surprisingly, I filled the room at all four screenings. Some male chauvinists ignored the invitations. But on the whole, the media was curious to discover what a strange bird this woman was who dared to shoot a film under the bombs of the Royal Air Force.
RS: You filmed The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived on the frontlines of the Dhofar War—what was that shoot was like?
HS: On a moral level, these were the happiest days of my life. Never in the Arab World, nor the Islamic world, did I hear of a People’s Army barefooted, without grades nor salaries, liberating one-third of the country whilst building the country and serving the people. It’s the People’s Army who built the first road, school, hospital, pilot farm, and waterholes of the country. Most importantly, this Army taught democracy to children and practiced positive discrimination in favor of women 30 years before the West. It’s only some 24 years later when I shot Rising Above, Women of Vietnam, that I realized how radical and innovative The People’s Front of Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf (PFLOAG) really was. Vietnamese women played a major role on the military level. General Dinh is a woman of military genius. Starting with seven old, rusted guns, she ended up defeating 10,000 men armed with tanks and planes. This peasant women liberated the first province of South Vietnam with mostly peaceful methods. Yet she and most Vietnamese women were obedient, if not subservient to male authority. On the contrary the PFLOAG encouraged women’s and children’s rebelliousness. That’s very important to me as they are the internal colonies of Arab societies. Whereas most liberation movements—Algeria, Palestine, to some extent Vietnam—postponed women’s liberation after independence, the PFLOAG did the opposite: here and now we liberate women. Here and now we abolish polygamy and the Islamic dower that enables the father to sell his minor daughter to an old man.
On the material level, the shooting was hell. We walked some 800 km through deserts and high mountains, under the scorching sun, freezing at night. Sometimes we walked by night 14 hours eating just a bit of rice and two cups of tea. All that under the bombardments of the Royal Air Force. The spoiled Beiruti bourgeois girl that I was would have never been able to overcome this hardship without the extraordinary feminism of the People’s Army who kept encouraging me. The real heroes are my crew: French cameraman Michel Humeau, sound man Jean Louis Ughetto, Yemeni assistant director and second camera Itz’hac Ibrahim Souleili. Michel carried a 10 kg synchronous camera and Jean Louis a 12 kg Nagra. It’s thanks to Michel that for the first time in Arab Cinema, the illiterate shepherdess, the five-year-olds, had a voice. Previously, only top politicians spoke before TV cameras.
I had insisted on sync sound, impossible in an area without electricity. But Michel innovated: the first time in the history of cinema, he used a solar battery—a technique only used by NASA—to feed the synchronous camera. They also worked for an extra month on the film, as most of the time was spent walking in a roadless area. As to Itz’hac, his second camera, which was lent by the South Yemeni Ministry of Culture, saved the film when the sync camera stopped in the most dramatic moment: the bombardment of the British bases protecting the Sultan’s capital. We continued the shooting with Itz’hac’s primitive camera until we could repair the sync one. He was a great moral support to me and saved my life when I nearly drowned.
RS: How did you get your cameras in and then how did you get your footage back out?
HS: I was terribly disappointed when I saw the rushes. Very little of the radical feminism of the PFLOAG was left. This is because my heroic French cameraman was unconsciously (or consciously?) hostile to the feminism of the Front. So was the no-less-heroic sound man. The two Frenchmen were radically left wing, but like many leftists in those days, they were hostile to the MLF (French Women Liberation Movement) who—it must be admitted—was not very mature in these early days. This was in 1971. To oppose the traditional femininity, some French feminists farted, others burped loudly, championed foul smelling armpits, and even pinched men’s arses. So, my directorial instructions were ignored, if not sabotaged, every time I wanted to show the feminism of the Front.
RS: The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived is a deeply anticolonial and anti-imperialist film, which I think will resonate with a lot of young people today—do you feel the world has made strides in these efforts? Do you have hope that the youth will continue the fight?
HS: We are going through a very bad moment in the pendulum of history. After all the bloodshed in the decolonization process, after all the people sacrificed for the sacred right of self-determination, we hear today that a superpower or a local power, believes it’s entitled to conquer territories by force. “Might is right,” was the logic of Hitler. We are back to the 19th century in many ways. But let’s not forget that even though Hitler’s audacity appeared as an unstoppable tsunami, he ended up defeated. In my experience, there are many signs that the youth is thirsty for democracy, feminism, and secularism. When The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived was screened on Entracinessta, a Spanish-Egyptian online platform, they recorded ten times more viewings than usual. At the Q&A, a young man said, “During the seven days where the film was available online, I watched it ten times!” Recently, in Tunisia during my retrospective, a young man (not a young woman) decided to create a “Heiny Srour Ciné Club’’ to show my feminist films, which was in Sfax, a provincial town where fundamentalism is rising. Youth needs ideological tools to resist, and this is where the distribution of films is so important.
RS: Your films are feminist and socialist, movements that are beginning to have a resurgence in the U.S. with young people today but are still taboo with the country as a whole. Why do you think there is always such a resistance towards these ideologies?
HS: I wouldn’t dare to give my opinion about a country I know mostly from books and films. I visited but didn’t live in the U.S. McCarthyism seems to have had a strong impact on the people’s mind. Noam Chomsky analyzed better than me how the ruling class managed to “manufacture consent” The great American analysts such as Howard Zinn or Betty Friedan are excellent at analyzing, but disappointing at giving solutions.
RS: Leila and the Wolves shows us a history of women as resistance fighters in Palestine and Lebanon over the course of several decades—what was your research process as you wrote those vignettes?
HS: Most facts about Palestine come from the book by Khadige Abu Ali on Palestinian women and what Samir Nemr, an Iraqi working in the Palestine Film Unit, told me, like the marriage scene. The Lebanese part comes from what my friends told me. I also based it on my personal experiences and used stories from the readers’ letters sent to the Lebanese daily newspaper L’Orient-Le Jour.
RS: One of my favorite lines is when a woman on the beach says, “Equality is exhausting,” which I think speaks to how people can become apathetic, even towards their own liberation.
HS: The woman in the bikini who finds equality “exhausting” is Heiny Srour in moments of despondency. It’s sometimes too much for one human being only to jump from the illiteracy of my grandmother to making such innovative, difficult-to-achieve films, without any professional background. But then, as the Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi put it, “The road of freedom is difficult, but the road of slavery is even more difficult.” So, I end up back on the road of freedom, after suffering from oppression. Even Einstein proved that we are zig zagging inside a straight line. I find it very mysterious how so many women can put up with slavery.
RS: Over the last 50 years there have been a lot of documentaries, experimental, and recently narrative films made by women from Palestine and Lebanon. Can you speak a bit about the legacy of women telling their own stories through the medium of film?
HS: A lot of women are now speaking out through the medium of cinema. And not just in Palestine and Lebanon, but throughout the Arab world. In Lebanon, they constitute, strangely enough, the majority of filmmakers. Arab women are winning international awards, like my fellow Lebanese filmmaker Nadine Labaki for example. At the same time, the women’s condition is looking backward throughout the Arab world. I was very surprised in Tunisia when women film critics and cinephiles passionately read a text I wrote some 50 years ago. I was even more surprised when a collective of Maghreb women translated this text in Arabic and published it as a trilingual book: Arab, Woman . . . and Filmmaker, which will be sold and autographed by me during the American opening. It confirmed that the high visibility of privileged women is hiding the invisibility of the vast majority of women: the poor, the marginalized, the battered, the underprivileged. Though more severe in emerging countries, it’s a worldwide phenomenon. We should never forget that. I disagree with the feminism for the 5%. I stand for a feminism for the 100%.
RS: This restoration of Leila and the Wolves marks the first time the film will be playing widely in the United States. Can you talk about this restoration process?
HS: It’s thanks to a remarkable lady in the CNC (French National Cinema Center). Béatrice de Pastre is one of the few persons concerned with saving the memory of women’s films and Third World Cinema. Most other restoration decision makers restore men’s films and films made by the white man looking at the indigenous people. Yet, Third World Cinema made a U-turn in the history of cinema. Women’s films made an important contribution, too. The restoration took place in the internal Lab of the CNC during COVID days, which made it difficult. Béatrice de Pastre, Simone Appleby, the head of the lab, helped me avoid mistakes. The sound restorer, Leon Rousseau, is a magician, probably the best in France.
RS: What do you hope American audiences take away from watching this film?
HS: A message of peace. This film is a bridge of peace, and it’s no coincidence that the French opening is placed under the High Patronage of Jack Lang, former Minister of Culture, who is of Jewish descent, currently President of the Paris IMA (Institute of the Arab World). After October 7, he organized a Peace march from the IMA to the MAHJ (Jewish Museum of Art and History). It was the only demonstration I took part in. I was asked to value every human life, be it Israeli or Palestinian. Every life is sacred. This film is a bridge of peace because it goes to the root of the problem. If we don’t want wars or October 7 to happen again, we must have the courage to face the fact that the Zionist dream of giving “a land to a people without land on a land without people” was a misrepresentation of reality. There were a people in Palestine, a people of poor peasants who sacrificed immensely in a very unequal battle against British Imperialism, and, later, against Zionism.
RS: The first time I saw Leila and the Wolves, I was so struck by the dance with death montage at the end. How did you come up with that sequence?
HS: It was added to the original, award-winning script during rekeying in Syria with the production manager Naim Al Housari. My Syrian colleagues Omar Amiralay and Mohamed Malas, whose help was invaluable, insisted I hide my Jewishness. It was asking too much from a woman raised in the culture of the “Chosen People of God.” I had no option but to agree, for my Syrian colleagues were in great difficulty with their government, and I couldn’t do without their help. However, it was a childish thing to ask: Damascus is just two hours’ drive from Beirut, and many Syrians have family in Lebanon. Anyway, hiding your religion is suspicious in countries where it’s the first thing people want to know about you. Besides, the Syrians had a bad experience with the Israeli spy Elie Cohen who reached top government circles. It took very little before my religious origin was known. When the production manager asked me about mine, pretending ignorance, in order to put me down, I faced him with his hypocrisy. So, I added this scene to the scenario. The shooting was hell with the Syrian crew, in part because of the issue of my Jewishness.
important to know that Damascus is small, and all cinema people know each other; they meet in two or three coffee shops and the most insignificant gossip circulates promptly. I admire my dear friend Omar Amiralay as the most audacious and politically intelligent filmmaker, both in form and content. But when it comes to my Jewishness. . . Are you starting to understand why, over 40 years later, the whole Middle East is performing this dance of death?
“There’s no coincidence in history,” said Baruch Spinoza, founder of modern European philosophy. He was excommunicated from Judaism for putting his finger on the Torah, a contradiction between the Universal God and the tribal God of the “Chosen People.” But he missed another contradiction: the Universal God who loves all his creatures equally but heavily discriminates against women. It only took four centuries for this contradiction to be noticed.