March 17, 2025
Encore screening!
LEILA AND THE WOLVES
HEINY SROUR in person!
Leila and the Wolves
Heiny Srour. Lebanon, Palestine, 1984.
90 minutes.
In Arabic with English ST.
Screening followed by a Q+A with Heiny Srour and Fariha Róisín.
Written in 1979 and not completed until 1984, Leila and the Wolves is Lebanese feminist filmmaker Heiny Srour’s only feature-length fiction film. A wholly inventive reinscription of Arab women into collective, colonialist, and patriarchal memory, Leila was shot during the harrowing Lebanese and Syrian civil wars. The film employs song, folklore, reenactment, archival footage, multiple oral histories, and feminist perspicacity to construct a journey for the Lebanese Leila (Nabila Zeitoni), a student who time-travels from her photography exhibition in 1980s London, to Palestine at the turn of the 20th cent., and otherwise into colorfully constructed liberatory space.
Leila and the Wolves has been restored by CNC – Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée and has received new U.S. distribution with indie distributor Several Futures.
Presented with Mezzanine and Several Futures.
Following its first-ever, sold-out Los Angeles screening at Rotations in May 2024, this encore screening of Leila and the Wolves welcomes the legendary Heiny Srour herself, who will be in LA after the film screens in Brooklyn, Dallas, and Cleveland, and before heading to Canada.
About filmmaker Heiny Srour
Heiny Srour is a Lebanese filmmaker born in Beirut in 1945, known for being the first Arab woman filmmaker to have a film selected for the Cannes Film Festival, The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived. Srour studied Social Anthropology in Paris and later worked as a journalist and film critic. She has long been interested in Third World cinema and the role of Arab women in revolutions.
About moderator Fariha Róisín
Fariha Róisín is a multidisciplinary artist, born in Ontario, Canada. She was raised in Sydney, Australia, and is based in Los Angeles. As a Muslim queer Bangladeshi, she is interested in the margins, in liminality, otherness and the mercurial nature of being. Her work has pioneered a refreshing and renewed conversation about wellness, contemporary Islam and queer identities and has been featured in Al Jazeera, The Guardian, and Vogue. She is the author of the poetry collection How To Cure A Ghost (2019), as well as the novel Like A Bird (2020), Who Is Wellness For? (2022) and her second book of poetry is entitled Survival Takes a Wild Imagination, due fall 2023.
About distributor Several Futures
Several Futures is a North American Film Distribution company founded in 2022 by filmmaker Graham L. Carter, with a goal of bringing auteurist and anti-imperialist films to the U.S. and Canada.
