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Leila and the Wolves poster

Leila and the Wolves

1986 · Heiny Srour

For when you want cinema as excavation — a challenging, one-of-a-kind film to sit with and think about for days, not a passive night on the couch.

What it's about

A young Lebanese woman named Leila moves through fifty years of Palestinian and Lebanese history — from the 1936 revolt in Palestine to the siege of Beirut — searching out the women that the official record erased. It isn't a straight-line story: scenes, songs, and reenactments accumulate like tiles in a mosaic, showing women who smuggled weapons, held communities together, and kept memory alive, only to be written out of the histories afterward.

The experience

Dreamlike and defiant at once — it drifts between eras like a séance, and its pattern-based structure asks you to lean in rather than be carried. Patient, haunting viewing that keeps rearranging what you thought you knew.

The craft

Heiny Srour spent nearly a decade making it, shooting in fragments through the disruptions of the Lebanese civil war, and built its structure from Arab oral storytelling and mosaic patterning — tableaux and songs that repeat and rhyme instead of a plot that marches forward. The form is the argument: history told the way women actually kept it.

Why it matters

Srour was the first woman from the Arab world with a film selected at Cannes, and this restored landmark has become a touchstone for Arab feminist cinema and for filmmakers reclaiming histories told from below.

Reception & legacy: how Leila and the Wolves was received, argued over, and remembered →

Heiny Srour, the first woman from the Arab world to have a film selected at Cannes, spent the better part of a decade assembling this mosaic — a fiction, an essay, a séance — in which a young Lebanese woman named Leila moves through half a century of Palestinian and Lebanese history, recovering the women that official chronicles erased. Shot piecemeal through the disruptions of the Lebanese civil war, the film borrows its structure from Arab oral storytelling and the patterned repetitions of mosaic tilework: tableaux, songs, and reenactments accumulate rather than progress, so that the 1936 revolt in Palestine and the siege of Beirut become panels in a single design. Srour's feminism is inseparable from her anti-colonialism; the women here smuggle weapons, hold funerals, keep memory alive, and are then written out twice over — by occupiers and by their own men. Long nearly impossible to see, the film circulated in battered prints until a 4K restoration returned its saturated colors and its argument to circulation, where it now reads as a founding text of Arab feminist cinema.

Lines of influence