The Lonely Feminist

“The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived” and “Leila and the Wolves” are playing in theaters across the country.

In 1961, when filmmaker Heiny Srour was 16, she started a feminists’ club in her school, Lycée Français de Beirut. Inspired by an Arabic saying that “the Arab man suffers from the jail where he locks the Arab woman,” she made the club coed. The girls eventually left to focus their energies on the larger students’ liberation movement, leaving Srour alone in her feminist quest. She continued to battle this loneliness into her time as a Ph.D. student in La Sorbonne, where she met representatives of the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf, a group that liberated Dhofar from the Sultanate of Oman and thereafter ensured that women were sent to school and trained in political thought and armed warfare. 

Srour went to Dhofar in 1969 with two French men she barely knew. Together, they traveled 800 kilometers of desert through British Royal Army airstrikes and bombardments to make a documentary, “The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived.” When it debuted at Cannes in 1974, it was the first film made by an Arab woman to ever play at the festival. 

A decade later, she made “Leila and the Wolves,” a docudrama about a Lebanese Ph.D. student in London whose research leads her to explore the legacy of war and politics she has inherited from a line of resilient and courageous women in Palestine and Lebanon. Both films, barely seen in the U.S., have been restored and are now playing at theaters across the country. I sat down with Srour to chat about her films, her life and the world we live in. Our two-hour conversation has been edited for length and clarity.  

You’ve called yourself a “spoiled-rotten armchair Leftist” as a young woman. How did that woman end up making films in Dhofar?

I was doing a Ph.D. in social anthropology at La Sorbonne and I really wanted to be a filmmaker. But there were no grants for women in those days. I was also working at AfricAsia magazine while doing my Ph.D. because I wanted to go to film festivals, which would cost a lot of money. It was 1969. I was in Paris, and thanks to a Lebanese colleague, I met the representative of the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf.  He spoke of social reform in Oman, and I thought to myself, “We’ve seen it in Egypt. We’ve seen it in Syria, and we saw what happened.” I didn’t believe him.

I had never heard of a country called Oman, so I didn’t believe him when he said that there was oil and the citizens of Oman were not allowed to work in the oilfield. I didn’t believe him when he described a country stuck in the Stone Age. I thought it was Arab exaggeration when he said to me that the citizens of Oman were not allowed to eat oranges and apples because they are for the British. I didn’t believe him because it sounded surreal.

I decided: I’m not going to write a word about this. Then he said, “The most important reform that we made, and the proudest reform that we made, is women’s liberation.” My Ph.D. was a comparative study of Lebanese women with the rest of Arab women. There was this dogma that women are more conservative than men, and this is why they didn’t want to vote for women.

Did you feel a connection?

Yes, I was interviewing political parties in Lebanon. They had no programs for women. Because I’m of Jewish descent, they were saying it was a Zionist plot to split the ranks and to set women against men. The main enemy, they believed, is imperialism. 

I met the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf people in a very hot place without air conditioning, and it was suffocating. When the Arab man talked about women’s liberation, I thought I was hallucinating as an effect of the heat.

The discourse of the Arab left was that when we will be free from imperialism, women will be automatically liberated. But this man spoke like the traditional women sitting under the tree in “Leila and the Wolves” saying that women are not just oppressed by imperialism. They are oppressed by their father, by their uncle, by their cousin, by their brother, by their husband. They are oppressed by the several sultans. This man’s speech was a very new discourse, and I thought I was hallucinating.

I told him to repeat everything he said because I hadn’t taken any notes so far. It was most embarrassing.

Jean-Pierre Viennot had gone to Dophar and wrote about it in Le Monde diplomatique. He told me it’s real. It shows that I had a colonized mind, that I had to wait for a white man to confirm this. That’s how distrustful I was of the Arab left: I don’t think you can be an antisemite and a socialist.

Tell me about that feminist club you founded in school.

I invited one of the very few feminist men I knew to speak to us, the lawyer Abdullah Zakhia, and he made us discover that although we were proud that our miniskirts were shorter than in Paris, the law governing the women in Lebanon were the same as in Saudi Arabia. If I had to travel out of Lebanon, I could not do it without the permission of my father or brother. In the group meetings, we read Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex.” It was really quality conscience-raising. But when the girls dissolved the women’s movement, I felt very lonely for years. 

Then you went to Dophar to film?

A central committee member nearly refused me permission to shoot because he felt that I was not feminist enough. He told me, “Your only oppression is your oppression as a woman. If you are not radical on that issue, if you are not principled, how can I trust you to enter the liberated area?” So this was my revolution, and what I saw was beyond my dreams.

The men and the women had nearly a 2,000-year gap when it came to equality. The men emigrated secretly to the north of the Gulf, working in the oil field; they discovered newspapers, television; they discovered the rest of the world. The women’s world was goats, rocks and trees. All illiterate. The Front was determined to fulfill this gap, and they did it by practicing positive discrimination. So out of 500 men who would apply for the Front, they would take 150; out of 200 women, they would take 150. The opposite of the Palestinian and the Algerian revolution. The shot in “The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived” where there are 3,000 guerrillas raising their guns, that is the school of the future cadets of the revolution. The women got six months training. They learned to read and write. There was a massive consciousness-raising among the people’s militia.

But you’ve said you’re not very happy with what “The Hour” turned out to be?

Unfortunately, the feminism of the Front doesn’t show in the film. In those days, there were no camerawomen. I took these two French men who were from the Communist Party; one was Maoist and the other a Trotskyite. I didn’t understand the difference; I wasn’t that sophisticated, but I realized they’re pretty anti-feminist.

Why do you think that is?

It was in 1971, the early days of the women’s liberation movement, at least in France. The Mouvement de libération des femmes was not very mature in those early days.

What do you mean?

To overcome stereotypes, women would fart loudly or burp. Their newspaper was called “The Burning Kitchen Cloth” and in that they said that deodorants were toxic. So they said “We will strike this week, strike of the smelly armpits, we’re gonna smell in the office, in the house, in the street.” Some of it was really good, but some of it was childish. Demanding abortion, contraceptive pills; I totally agree with that part, but they were also pinching men’s asses. So yeah, every time I pointed at something feministic, they didn’t film it. 

But you were the director!

First of all, I’d never made a film. They were 10 years older. But also the cameraman was carrying a 10 kilo camera, walking 800 kilometers with it, sleeping on the floor, suffocating during the day under the scorching sun, freezing at night. Walking 14 hours nonstop because of the military danger at night, sometimes eating one bowl of rice with a cup of tea. The sound man carried 12 kilos. Sometimes the guerilla would help them, and they would quickly take it back, because they’d hold the camera like a Kalashnikov. If they banged it against a rock, that’d be the end of it. So they would take it back. 

How did you measure that distance?

The sound man counted it. Every two steps is a meter. In one minute you make so many meters, in one hour this much. They were furious with me. I really was ignorant; I didn’t know that it was going to be so difficult. They’d yell at me, “What did you come to do? Did you come to walk or did you come to shoot?” We kept walking because we were surrounded by the bombardment of the Royal Air Force and scared of them using napalm.

So, they wouldn’t film what you asked them to film?

We couldn’t differentiate between the men and the women cadets: Women had their hair cut short because of lice; they didn’t wear bras. So the only way to recognize them as women was to shoot from close, but they shot it from far away. I endured all that because I was dreaming of slapping the Arab left in their faces, to give them another model, and to prove to them that they’ve been wrong all these years, with the honorable exception of the Iraqi Communist Party and the Sudanese Communist Party, when they were strong. 

But you do have some close-up footage …

I had a Yemeni cameraman, thanks to Abdulla Al Khamiri, the minister of culture of Yemen. He paid for our stay and travel in Yemen and paid for our luggage. He also sent a cameraman with a very primitive [Bolex] camera. We used what he shot.

You literally shot air raids. It was so unsafe.

There was no sync sound in the Arab world then but I insisted on sync sound. A sync camera runs on a battery that you charge, but there was no electricity. So the French cameraman innovated by using a technique only used in those days by NASA: solar battery. But that’s a very dangerous thing to use. Because when you heard the planes of the Royal Air Force, we’d be asked to take off our glasses because of the reflection. The solar battery had a big mirror. So the dilemma was, if I gave my voice to the voiceless, the Royal Air Force would come and wipe me, my crew and the military off. We had impossible logistic problems to sort out. The film was also very sensitive to temperature changes, so we had to put it in the caves. And every time they would ask me, “Okay, how many? How many cans do we take?” I’d say, “I don’t know.”

I had only heard bombardment in the cinema. When the Royal Air Force starts bombarding, you feel the noise piercing your brain, your eyes, your ears, your guts, your flesh. It’s a terrifying experience, and I shat it in my trousers. It was a very humiliating experience. I couldn’t control my terror and would scream and end up sabotaging the sound recording. So the poor man had carried this heavy equipment only to have me scream over his recording. He called me a shit director, and 40 years later, when we showed the film in the Forum des Images in France, he corrected it and he said a director of shit.

Did they come to Cannes with you? 

It was just me, because Cannes doesn’t pay for you to take your team. I was so broke, the only press book was typed by me, not the glossy stuff. And the poster I had only had two colors, red and black, because a big poster in color was very expensive.

Do you remember what you wore?

I wore a traditional Lebanese dress most of the time. I only had one in green and one blue. I was really broke, but it worked. In Cannes these days to attract press you give gifts, throw cocktail parties and have a helicopter dragging in the sky with the name of the film. I thought: I will not get any attention. But to my agreeable surprise, there were four screenings and it was all full, and I had a lot of interviews. I suppose they were curious to see what strange bird an Arab woman who walked 800 kilometers was.

I will change gears a little bit. In “Leila” there is a line where she says people don’t understand why a Lebanese woman feels solidarity with the Palestinians. As a pro-Palestinian Jewish person, aren’t you scared the film will now be seen as antisemitic?

I’m totally immune to that kind of slander. “Leila” is a bridge of peace. Apart from being a filmmaker, I happen to be the sister-in-law of Dr. Elie Hallak, who was kidnapped and executed by Hezbollah in 1986. He was Syrian-born with an Iranian passport; nobody was going to pay for his ransom. Israel refused to exchange him for Palestinian prisoners. The excuse being that if they do that every Jew could become a target.

He was held hostage for a year, and on Oct. 7, I really identified with the anxiety of the families. That uncertainty is the worst thing in the world and I relived that anxiety on Oct. 7.

Because I don’t want Oct. 7 to happen ever again, we must have the moral courage to face the roots of the problem. I’m very scared of what’s happening in Gaza. Jews are traumatized by the Holocaust, and they are inflicting a genocide on the Palestinian people. What is going to happen to these Palestinians who suffer a genocide? I’m very scared for the short term, but hopeful in the long term. 

How has the re-release of the films been in this political climate?

I want to show my film to the Jewish communities of Brooklyn; the Sephardis, the Lebanese, the Syrians, the Iraqis, I want to show it to them and have a proper discussion. Of course, I condemn Oct. 7. It’s wrong to kidnap children. It’s wrong to kidnap civilians, old people, women. But when I say “Free Palestine,” I mean I want a truly sovereign state next to Israel in peace. The price of peace is justice, as Jesse Jackson said. 

What does that look like for you?

The real sovereign state for a free Palestine is where the Palestinians have their own airport, their own water. The moment they discover a well of water, the settlers jump in. Can I tell you a story of water?

Of course.

After my father died, I went to Israel because I didn’t want my mother to spend Rosh Hashanah alone. So I went for 15 days. The most painful memory is that at lunch time, I was horrible to her. Why? Because she allowed me to shower only in the morning and in the evening. Otherwise the carpet wouldn’t dry. I needed three showers a day and I was in a bad mood at lunch time and said things that I regret. I thought, how do the Palestinians manage to have one shower per week? For me, it is about the right to have their water, to have the right to their own phone, internet network. I mean a really sovereign state. 

You don’t sound like you’re scared of anything but are you nervous screening the film?

The Israelis don’t realize that Oct. 7 is no more than a mirror to the long history of massacres of civilians that they committed in 75 years of Zionism. Two wrongs don’t make a right. But if we really want this spiral of violence to stop, if we really want to save human life on both sides, we have to go to the root of the problem. The root of the problem is that they thought they’re going to give to a people without a land, a land without a people. But there was a people in this land, and a people of peasants, and peasants are very attached to their land, and they fought a very unequal battle against British imperialism. So I staged “Leila” as a bridge of peace. I show Deir Yassin, which was a turning point. The real Deir Yassin had ochre stones; it’s now destroyed. People wore black dresses embroidered with red. I chose a black stone village; I made black goats pass as a sign of bad omen, and I dressed people in white, the symbol of innocence. I staged it as a bridge of peace. I refuse the exhibitionism of the atrocities, but I really want the Israeli and the Sephardi Jews to stop being amnesiac. There was the massacre of Tantura, there was the massacre of Kafr Kassem. There was the Sabra and Shatila massacre by Phalangists but under Israeli supervision. If we want to have peace, the price is justice.