Sightlines · reception

How Leila and the Wolves was received

1986 · Heiny Srour · Leila and the Wolves on Sightlines

The arc

Barely seen for decades — banned across much of the Arab world and nearly impossible to find — it was rescued by a French CNC restoration that premiered in Venice Classics in 2021, and its 2025 North American tour turned a lost film into a rediscovered landmark of Arab feminist cinema.

What’s debated

The recurring conversation isn't whether it's great but why it was invisible for forty years — every screening becomes a referendum on how film culture erased Arab women filmmakers.

Its footprint

It's become a banner title of the restoration circuit and a touchstone for Arab and feminist film programming, regularly paired with Srour's The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived — the film that made her the first Arab woman director selected at Cannes.

Where it stands

A canon climber of the rediscovery era: long a rumor more than a film, now a 'you must see this' fixture of feminist and Third Cinema watchlists.

Did you know? The film was banned in much of the Arab world for decades — roughly 45 years, and it still can't screen in several Arab countries — even as its restoration toured Venice, London and New York.

Named by the director

• 8½ (1963) — Srour said Fellini's film liberated her from beginning-climax-end storytelling and showed her cinema could express everything she wanted to say.
• The Hour of the Furnaces (1968) — She cited Solanas and Getino's militant Third Cinema epic as a formative inspiration for her political filmmaking.