Leila and the Wolves

With her first feature, The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived (1974), Srour became the first female Arab filmmaker to have a film selected for competition in the Cannes Film Festival. Leila and the Wolves, her sole fiction feature, made over a six-year period, expands upon her career-long interest in the contribution of women in the struggle for anti-colonial liberation. Tracing the twin histories of Lebanon and Palestine across the twentieth century through a series of narrative vignettes, Srour centers the sacrifices made by Arab women overlooked in official accounts. In a recent interview, Srour described the film as “an archaeological excavation of the collective memory of women of the Middle East. I wanted to rewrite History from a female and feminist point of view. . . . Leila and the Wolves is a disillusioned film. But I remain faithful to the cause of justice in spite of immense political disappointments.”