The following is a transcript of Heiny Srour’s introduction to the screening of LEILA WA AL ZIAP (1984) that took place on 29 June 2023 at Il Cinema Ritrovato XXXVII in Bologna, Italy. The screening was preceded by the short film LES FEMMES PALESTINIENNES (Jocelyne Saab, 1973) and was programmed by festival director Cecilia Cenciarelli. [JM]
A couple of days ago, Thierry Frémaux said that you should never screen a film at four o’clock or three o’clock – it’s the biology. So, you defied the biology and you still came! I feel very flattered.
You will notice that I’m wearing a Syrian dress. It’s black because I’m mourning the dozens or, rather, the hundreds of thousands of people who died in Syria, the place where I shot some of the most beautiful scenes of LEILA AND THE WOLVES. It is embroidered because I hope that Syria will go back to its former splendor. Yesterday, Wim Wenders was saying that he learned most from his defeat. The Syrian people have been flatly defeated, after so many years of suffering and so much destruction of their country. So, I hope that they will bounce back and that they move forward, as much forward creatively as Wim Wenders himself went.
Concerning LEILA AND THE WOLVES, it’s coming back home in some ways, because the idea strangely enough started when I was presenting THE HOUR OF LIBERATION [1974] at the Pesaro Film Festival. An Italian feminist came and told me, “Hey, come and see this monument. It’s all about the martyrs of the resistance against fascism, and there are only men. But women played an important role.” And it was very much what I was experiencing after having made a PhD in comparative study in the Sorbonne. And in, you know… the Algerian women have been very much mediatized and after that they were forgotten and their sacrifices went down the drain. 60 and 70 years after independence, it’s the same. And the Palestinian revolution was taking the same path of using women’s energy, just for the men to take power more quickly. It was the opposite of what I had filmed in Dhofar, the social experiment I filmed in Dhofar in the documentary THE HOUR OF LIBERATION, because the [Popular] Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf did exactly the same – talking to women, massive conscious raising, we liberate women here and now and we don’t wait for victory. It was the opposite in the Algerian and the Palestinian revolution, and the Lebanese national movement. According to people who make women’s film festivals, [LEILA AND THE WOLVES] is the only one so far which examines 80 years of women’s participation, that looks at 80 years of history from a feminist point of view in various situations: insurrection in a town struggle, general strike in the town, a massacre, civil war – a variety of situations where women give their blood and their energy and get nothing. Which doesn’t mean you shouldn’t participate, but which mean that you should put your condition and insist that the women’s liberation agenda is put here and now before our participation starts, and this is never done, unfortunately.
How did I manage to shoot this film without being shot? I don’t know, it’s a mystery to me. [Claps in the room.] We nearly got killed many times, many many times. And even, you know, in scenes that look very innocent. There is a scene where you see no faces, you just see windows. My cameraman nearly got killed, you know, the bullet came here. [Points in front of her head.] I mean, it could have come here, and I don’t know what I would have said to his family. Because shooting at dusk in Beirut is extremely dangerous. And, you know, in the final scene as well, it’s very dangerous. We nearly got shot in Syria also, all the crew nearly got machine gunned by the Syrian police who had mistaken us for the Muslim Brotherhood, who were demonstrating near us, thinking we were terrorists. So anyway, we nearly got killed a great many times, and thank goodness everyone came out alive.
You will see in this film – something very important to me – is that patriarchy also oppressed men. Not just women, but men also, although it’s quite hidden and it’s not talked about. And it prevents men to fulfill their potential. I would like to say here that, you know, women under patriarchy are terribly… I mean, remarkable women are totally forgotten. I saw recently a serial film about the space conflict. Now, there is a lot of footage about the charm of Yuri Gagarin, the first one, his charming smile, his tour around the world. But, I mean, he was an officer of the Red Army! Valentina Tereshkova, who made a lot of noise in those days and was nominated for women of the year, came from… you know, she had much more merit. She was a textile worker; she wasn’t in the army. She was a textile worker and she became the first space pioneer after Yuri Gagarin. Another thing which horrified me recently - I saw a series of films on Vietnam, and I shot a film about the women of Vietnam. Now, there wasn’t a word in this series about a woman of genius, General [Nguyen Thi] Dinh. General Dinh was an illiterate woman who made her class with the Viet Cong – she learned read and write – and she was the first general of the twentieth century. In those days, Ho Chi Minh didn’t want to give them weapons because he wanted to build socialism in North Vietnam. So, she organized the “Long Haired Army”, made of women, and she liberated the first province of [Southern] Vietnam. And she started with seven old, rusted guns and defeated ten thousand men fully armed with tanks and planes. And that’s extraordinary, to change completely what is called military art – I hate the word military art, but I mean, with seven old rusted guns, she defeated ten thousand men fully armed with heavy machinery. Not a word about her. And it just gives you an idea of just how much patriarchy could be venomous.
And that’s why my gratitude goes to the CNC, the French National Cinema Center, which is restoring women’s films and preventing them from sinking into oblivion. My gratitude goes to Béatrice de Pastre and Simone Appleby and all the team who restored the film. I really thank them from the depths of my heart, for saving for history two of my films. Thank you very much.
