“For me,” said Srour in a 1976 interview, “it’s inconceivable to be anti-imperialist – not to mention Marxist – without being feminist.” In every epoch in Leila and the Wolves, women work tirelessly to drive out colonial oppression and work alongside male-led resistance movements to support anti-colonial struggle; from filing down bullets on grinding stones in the 1930s British Mandate era whilst dousing British soldiers in boiling water, to training as armed militants in Palestinian refugee camps. Srour takes some creative license with individual stories, but this is all, of course, rooted in history. Palestinian women have been involved in armed resistance struggles and political organising since the 1920s, and Leila and the Wolves focuses on this integral, though under-researched, history of the Palestinian liberation struggle.

Born and brought up in Beirut by Lebanese Jewish parents, Heiny Srour has long been vocal about the empowerment of the Arab woman. Leila and the Wolves, shot in real locations across Lebanon and Syria during the Lebanese Civil War, takes as its inspiration the untold struggles of Palestinian and Lebanese women.

The history of female-led image making in the region sadly remains little-known. From Lebanese Marie Khazen (b. 1899), whose 1920s scenes showed women smoking, drinking, trouser-clad, queer and gender-fluid, often using experimental, layered images and double exposures, to Karimeh Abboud, (b.1893), the first Palestinian woman photographer, whose compositions invited women to step outside of the narrow confines of formal studio photography, into more playful, avant-garde poses and expressions, women imbued early Arab portraiture with a relaxed joyousness and humanity.

Like so many artists, cultural producers and creators, the vast majority of Abboud’s work was destroyed or looted during the Nakba of 1948. Thousands of images, photographs, films and musical recordings have been seized and classified by the Israeli military over the past 76 years, with the vast majority of the Palestinian archive inaccessible to the general population. Israel’s deliberate targeting of Palestinian audio-visual records – from the 1983 bombing of the PLO archives in Beirut to the deliberate destruction of Gaza’s libraries, museums and historic archives in recent months – means that the opportunities for Palestinian women to see themselves represented by their own artistic community have been extremely limited. For Srour, it was imperative that Palestinian women particularly found ways to document their own lives and to show the ways in which they “resist today as women always have in history, as citizens of a country wiped off the map and one half of a people who refuse to die but also as all women of the world who suffer a double oppression.”

Leila, the film’s Lebanese namesake, is introduced to us whilst installing an exhibition of Palestinian photography in London overlooked by a boyfriend, Rafiq, whose indifference is grimly predictable to her, as is his casual certainty that Arab women were “never involved in politics” historically, whilst briefing her on how to dress (in white) for her opening. Leila’s grandmother appears to her as a ghost to tell her the story of the wolves who devastated the shepherdless flocks of Lebanon and Palestine, before women took to the streets and fought back – “their black veils filled with anger.”

Leila dons a white robe, leading us through different eras, from the Great Arab Revolt of 1930s Jerusalem and group executions at Deir Yassin in 1948 to the pockmarked streets of 1980s Beirut, in a fourth-wall breaching renunciation of conventional form that would go on to influence many a filmmaker. Archival footage is incorporated so seamlessly that it is – at times – indistinguishable from Srour’s own shot footage, at others vividly punctuating fictionalised scenes with real images of bloodied corpses, piled up after the massacres of Sabra and Shatila, which evoke the horrific images that are brought to us daily from Gaza, including those taken after the recent Al-ShifaHospital massacre.

Seen today, Srour’s film has never felt more urgent. It speaks movingly to the toll paid by women who resist colonialism, and to the various ways in which Palestinian women have fought back against imperialist aggression. The film also highlights Arab women’s resistance in the home as well as on the battlefield, manifest in the ordinary and the commonplace: in song, folklore and sisterhood, in oral histories and traditions, in everyday acts of defiance, endurance and courage that, despite being consistently overlooked and devalued are, for Srour, nonetheless heroic and worthy of commemoration.

The Pan-Arab solidarity of the 1960s and 70s has long been threatened by imperialist power-brokering in the region. In Leila and the Wolves, Lebanese and Palestinian women are seen not as interchangeable but intimately bound through a bloodline steeped both in mythic power and suffering – their struggles deeply enmeshed and intertwined. The female characters are often expressionless, testament not to their lack of emotion but to their stoicism. Men, on the other hand, appear time and time again (Leila’s boyfriend Rafiq is cast through the ages as a patriarchal tyrant) as raging and unstable, refusing to support and uplift the women who support and uplift them, whether as mothers, sisters, wives or resistance fighters in their own ranks. When they speak, they are clownish, leering and needlessly cruel. At one point, Srour cuts to archival footage of Hitler, cleverly stripping him of agency by muting his speech so that all we see is the bombastic, frenzied machismo of his gestures.

There is a worry that the film be read through an orientalist lens and used to confirm Western biases about gendered oppression and patriarchy in the region. As Srour has pointed out in numerous interviews, Palestinian men have been brutally oppressed since 1948, but – as a consequence – have also contributed to gendered oppression in their own communities. This in no way renders the colonised man less deserving of freedom and must never be used to justify his brutalisation, but speaks to the wide-reaching, intersectional ways in which colonial violence is felt, experienced and embodied by different members of Palestinian society and to the urgent need for decolonisation, to safeguard the rights and interests of all.

In Leila and the Wolves, women endure every form of suffering: beaten by their husbands and killed by their fathers, cast out by their communities, denied love matches, relegated within armed resistance movements, made to sweat in their abayas whilst men frolic naked on the sand, constantly invisibilised: seen entirely as objects of sexual desire or matrimonial conquest. Srour unpacks the ways in which colonialism and patriarchy are lived, embodied and experienced by women across society and the ways in which the past, present and future can never be experienced as truly distinct for those whose lives continue to be shaped by routine violence – physical and structural. The past is both a terrifying haunting and a key to unlock the secrets of women’s ancestral power, courage and resistance. It yields tormenting ghouls and beneficent spirits. Without confronting it, Srour seems to suggest, we stand no chance of truly freeing ourselves.

As Palestinian women are killed daily by a genocide which has disproportionately marked them out for destruction (not only through indiscriminate killing but through torture, detention without trial, sexual and reproductive violence) it is important to recognise both the appalling violence of the past and the unfolding horrors of the present. Lebanese women have also been killed by Israeli bombardments of Southern Lebanon in recent months. Leila and the Wolves honors all those women – past, present, future and regardless of the colonial borders that separate them – whose lives have been dimmed by the everyday drudgery of patriarchy, and lost to the brutality and violence of both patriarch and coloniser, who are – for Srour – two sides of the same coin. In some of the penultimate scenes of the film, Palestinian female resistance fighters remove the blindfolds they have been training with, newly empowered to confront their imperialist aggressors, whilst veiled women disrobe and splash in the sea, no longer content to watch the men swim and bathe. Leila is last seen engulfed by masked, cloaked skeletons, whose frenzied dance eventually subsumes her. The struggle, Srour insists, is ongoing. Women have always resisted, they resist now and must resist going forwards. The violence of wolves intensifies each day, but so too does the strength of Palestinian and Lebanese women, united in their march – bearing the stories and struggles of all those women who have come before them – towards anti-colonial and feminist emancipation.

This text was commissioned by Open City Documentary Festival and Cinenova to accompany the screening of Leila and the Wolves (Heiny Srour, 1984) at the ICA.

NADIA YAHLOM is a practice-based PhD researcher at CREAM Westminster (working with speculative fiction, film, photography and objects) and a co-founder of Sarha Collective.