SESSION 110, ILLEGAL_CINEMA

Screeing of Leila and the Wolves (1984) by Heiny Srour, proposed by Akane Saraiva and Julia Martos.

Leila and the Wolves is an epic story that retells an old fable in feminist terms: the fable of the wolves that devoured untended herds of livestock in Lebanon and Palestine, and of the women who immediately rushed out into the fields and counterattacked.

Heiny Srour traverses five decades of Lebanese-Palestinian resistance to narrate what was – and continues to be – the role of Arab women in the anti-imperialist struggle. On this journey we are accompanied by a heroine, a character who loves by means of looking (she looks at the land, the sea, the waves, at naked men and the covered bodies of women, at rebellious legs seen through black veils of anger…) and struggles by posing questions. She opens a way through a territory at war and amongst its ruins inserts the real stories of those women who, through their actions, re-codified the space that stretches from the home to the battlefield.

Akane Saraiva is an artist, a draughtswoman, and many other things. She has been the coordinator of Illegal_Cinema for the last two years; parallel to this she has been developing her artistic practice and assisting in the projects of friends. She is interested in the encounters that take place between two or more independent bodies. Julia Martos is an artist and researcher, interested in the politics of the archive, its narratological and exhibition potential. The two of them are proposing this 110 session of Illegal_Cinema as a way of passing on the baton of coordination.