Srour’s second feature, Leila and the Wolves, demonstrates her political and stylistic fluidity. While never abandoning her political commitments, she experiments with cinematic potential. Whereas The Hour of Liberation hews closely to documentary conventions, Leila and the Wolves departs significantly from classic documentary. Even with the rise of hybrid cinema, documentary reenactments, and elevated sci-fi, Srour’s second feature still feels unclassifiable. Leila and the Wolves is historical fiction with surrealist elements, clear Brechtian influence, and almost theatrical acting that moves back and forth in time, defying linear conventions and historical teleology.
The protagonist Leila—first seen in an art exhibition in Beirut conversing with a man skeptical of women’s roles in regional liberation movements—travels back in time to show the active participation of Palestinian and Lebanese women in anticolonial struggle. The film swiftly moves among different visual styles and historical moments, mixing archival footage, documentary-style reenactments, and visually stunning surrealist scenes.
Although the film departs significantly from the documentary aesthetic of The Hour of Liberation, anticolonial struggle and women’s roles in emancipatory movements continue. Srour describes this as progressive, as opposed to militant cinema. “A progressive film helps you look at the world in a critical way… should help the viewers pause and think about the way history is told, because history is so distorted.”
Shot in Syria and Lebanon, this was Srour’s first experience working with actors. Funding remained an issue. “When you don’t have enough money, you have to give orders and you ask people to obey because you don’t have the time to repeat, rehearse, or give the actors enough time to really get inside the roles, and I really suffered from having to do that.” Despite limited resources, Srour was able to complete the film with help from colleagues such as Syrian director Omar Amiralay, who supported Srour during the shoot in Syria. Upon its completion, it “was too avant-garde for Cannes. It was screened on the British Channel 4 and was very successful,” she proudly elaborates. After its restoration, the film was screened at Venice, Edinburgh, and festivals worldwide.
When I asked how she managed to make such different films and whether one was closer to her heart, she responded with an anecdote: “In Croatia, they told me it’s as if it is not the same filmmaker who made both films.” She elaborated, “You must renew yourself; as a filmmaker, you shouldn’t stay the same but change radically from one film to the other.”
Beyond these two features, she only made Rising Above: Women of Vietnam (1995, 50 minutes) and The Singing Sheikh (1991, 11 minutes). The latter focuses on Sheikh Imam, an Egyptian singer whose frequent collaborations with Egyptian poet Ahmed Fouad Negm made the duo key figures in the history of Arab music in general and among leftist and revolutionary movements specifically. Srour is still trying, to this day, to secure funding to expand this short into a feature.
The difficulty that a filmmaker with as much talent, craft, and love for cinema faces securing support for a dream project about one of the most important icons in leftist cultural production attests to the brutality of cinematic infrastructures of financing, production, and exhibition. Although luckier than many Arab filmmakers whose films never got a chance at restoration, finding and restoring both The Hour of Liberation and Leila and the Wolves was quite challenging.