Liberating History: Leila and the Wolves (1984): Block Museum - Northwestern University
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Liberating History: Leila and the Wolves (1984)

Liberating History series poster
Cinema
October
8-9
7 PM

Event Details

Date & Time:

Thu October 8, 2020 - Fri October 9, 2020
7 PM

Location:

The Block Museum of Art
40 Arts Circle Drive
Evanston, IL 60208

Audience:

Open to the public

Details:

The screening will be available to watch on Block's Vimeo page for a 24-hour period, starting at 7 PM Central Time on October 8th.

Click here to join the program. The film will be freely available for 24 hours.

Online screening of LEILA AND THE WOLVES followed by a pre-recorded discussion between filmmaker Heiny Srour and Prof. Rebecca C. Johnson

LEILA AND THE WOLVES
(Heiny Srour, 1984, Lebanon/UK, digital, 93 min)

Starting at 7 PM Central Time on October 8th, LEILA AND THE WOLVES will be available to watch on Block's Vimeo page for a 24-hour period. Please RSVP through Eventbrite.

Followed by a pre-recorded discussion between filmmaker Heiny Srour and Professor Rebecca C. Johnson, Director of Middle East and North African Studies Program at Northwestern

About the film:

Heiny Srour’s striking, inventive film features Nabila Zeitouni as Leila, a young Lebanese woman in London who time-travels through twentieth-century Lebanon and Palestine. It was Srour’s second film, after the landmark documentary THE HOUR OF LIBERATION HAS ARRIVED, and her only feature-length fiction film. LEILA AND THE WOLVES brings together elements of documentary and evocations of Arabian mythology. Srour conducted often-dangerous location shooting for several years, combining wondrous compositions with images from archival film to reconstruct conventional historical narratives. Focusing on women’s neglected political and social contributions, LEILA AND THE WOLVES brings a sharp feminist perspective to the region’s conflicted colonial past.

LEILA AND THE WOLVES made available courtesy of Cinenova: Feminist Film + Video

RSVP

 



PART OF THE BLOCK CINEMA SERIES:
LIBERATING HISTORY: ARAB FEMINISMS AND MEDIATED PASTS


Liberating History: Arab Feminisms and Mediated Pasts celebrates Arab women filmmakers. The films draw on archival material, Islamic visual culture, and ethnographic practice to bring a decolonial and feminist perspective to personal and national pasts. The series includes path-breaking films such as Heiny Srour’s LEILA AND THE WOLVES, which centers Arab women’s struggles in the region’s modern history, and Selma Baccar’s FATMA 75, an essay film combining history and fantasy, as well as other rare and recent selections from Middle East and North Africa. The series will also feature two nights of short films curated by the Habibi Collective.

Co-presented by The Block Museum of Art with support from the Middle East and North African Studies Program at NU and Cultural Services of the French Embassy

 

Still from LEILA AND THE WOLVES courtesy of CinenovaStill from LEILA AND THE WOLVES courtesy of Cinenova

Contact The Block Museum of Art for more information: (847) 491-4000 or email us at block-museum@northwestern.edu

Press Coverage

Cinefile
LEILA AND THE WOLVES, the second feature by Lebanese director Heiny Srour—whose 1974 debut film, the documentary THE HOUR OF LIBERATION HAS ARRIVED, showed at Cannes, making her the first female Arab filmmaker to exhibit at the festival—is fiercely imaginative as it combines narrative and documentary elements (some of its footage even shot amongst the Lebanese and Syrian Civil Wars) to explore the collective memory of Arab women”
Kathleen Sachs, October 2, 2020
Girish Shambu
A striking Arab feminist film series, full of rarities from the past, is being hosted this month by the Block Cinema of Chicago. I have not been able to stop thinking about last week’s film, The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni (2011), by Lebanese director Rania Stephan. Tantalizingly hard to define, it is a found-footage film, an experimental biopic, an essay-portrait suspended between fiction and documentary.”
Girish Shambu, October 22, 2020