Born in 1945 in Beirut, Heiny Srour studied Sociology at the French University of Beirut (École supérieure des lettres) and went on to study Social Anthropology at the Sorbonne in Paris, where she was a student of both Marxist sociologist Maxime Rodinson and anthropologist Jean Rouch. In 1969, while pursuing a PhD on the status of Lebanese and Arab women and working as a journalist for AfricAsia magazine, she discovered the struggle of the Popular Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arabian Gulf, which led an uprising in the province of Dhofar against the British-backed Sultan of Oman. Determined to make a film about this feminist movement, Heiny Srour and her team crossed 500 miles of desert and mountains by foot, under bombardment by the British Royal Air Force to reach the combat zone and record the only document shot deep inside the Liberated Area. The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived was completed in 1974 and selected at the Cannes Film Festival, making Srour the first woman from the Third World to be selected at the prestigious festival. Including four years of restoration, this documentary took, in all, ten years of her life.

It took her six years to achieve her next film, Leila and the Wolves (1984), in which she unveiled the hidden histories of women in struggle, in particular in Palestine and Lebanon, by weaving an aesthetically and politically ambitious tableau of history, folklore, myth, and archival footage. In her words: “Why shouldn’t women be ambitious? Because men only want women to exclusively deal with women’s issues like home, family and so on, they want to ghettoize us. I resent this. We should deal with public affairs and political issues too.” Since initiating a feminist study group in Lebanon in the early 1960s, Heiny Srour has written and spoken extensively about the role of women in Arab cinema. —biography courtesy of Courtisane