Ege Yumusak in The Point:
The starkest, most disquieting scene from the film was printed on postcards and handed out at the door. We picked up our postcards as we hurried into the theater to secure our seats. My eyes widened: a group of women in burqas sat on a beach facing the ocean. Before them stood a woman with dark hair—uncovered—wearing a long, flowing white dress as she faced the women in the burqas. I began mentally preparing for the ideological and cultural translations—and mistranslations—I might be in for by the end of the movie, when we would inevitably run into acquaintances and friends in the foyer.
The director was privy to the provocations of her film, Leila and the Wolves. “This film offended everyone,” she proudly told the packed room at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, at a screening last spring. When the movie came out in the Eighties, everybody, including those on the left, could find something to be offended by in it. Her films were deemed insufficiently feminist for being full of guns, while at the same time criticized for “overemphasizing” women’s liberation in comparison to imperialism. Now her films could finally resume their provocations: since last spring, the “eighty-springs-young” director, Heiny Srour, has toured Europe, the U.K. and the U.S., screening new restorations of her masterpieces The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived (1974) and Leila and the Wolves (1984), thanks to programmers determined to bring her provocative socialist feminist oeuvre to wider audiences (a destiny all too rare in the history of Global South cinema). But this time around, especially in the West, she has found the political engagement with her work to be lacking. “In France, they shower me in praises,” Srour complained. Praise is boring. Trained as a sociologist, she wants her films to spark arguments.
More here.
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