Leila and the Wolves
40th Anniversary
+ Um tropeço em cinco movimentos May 22, 2024
2220 Arts + Archives
7:30 PM doors, 8:00 PM screening
Leila and the Wolves
+ Um tropeço em cinco movimentos
Leila and the Wolves
Heiny Srour. Lebanon, Palestine, 1984. 90 minutes.
In Arabic with English ST.
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. With gratitude to Nadi Lekol Nas on this 40th anniversary.
Preceded by
A Slippage in Five Movements (Um tropeço em cinco movimentos)
Valentina Rosset. Brazil, 2024. 15 mins.
Valentina Rosset in person!
An immersion into a musical performance of Toru Takemitsu’s graphic score composition “Corona: For Pianist(s),” incorporating the pianist’s hand gestures and the interior structure of the piano into vast landscapes, rhythmic waters and abstractions.
International Film Festival Rotterdam, 2024; Curtacinema–Rio de Janeiro International Short Film Festival, 2024
Heiny Srour is a Lebanese filmmaker born in Beirut in 1945, known for being the first Arab woman filmmaker to have a film, Saat El Tahrir Dakkat (The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived), selected for the Cannes Film Festival. She studied anthropology at the Sorbonne under Maxime Rodinson, a renowned Social Anthropologist, and during this time became interested in the ethnographic films of Jean Rouch. Taking influence also from European art cinema, cinema verité and Third Cinema, her work focuses on social justice issues and the role of Arab women in revolutions, where she often films under dangerous conditions. Filmography: Woman Global Strike 2000 (video, 2000), Women of Vietnam (video, 1998), The Eyes of the Heart (video, 1998), Rising Above – Women of Vietnam (1997), The Singing Sheikh (video, 1991), Leila and the Wolves (1984), Dhofar/Omar – The Guerillas of the Arabian Gulf (1973), The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived (1974).
Valentina Rosset is a Brazilian filmmaker from Sao Paulo, currently based in Los Angeles. Working between narratives and experimentation, she seeks to explore how intimacies and gestures of daily life create fictions and performances of their own. Her work has been screened at Rotterdam International Film Festival, CurtaCinema Rio de Janeiro, Spectacle Theater NYC, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the Film/Video program at California Institute of the Arts.
