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Heiny Srour Masterclass

Museum of Impossible Forms in collaboration with Academy of Moving People and Images and Aalto University/ Critical Cinema Lab warmly welcomes filmmaker Heiny Srour to Helsinki. Heiny Srour (1945) is one of the important female filmmakers in the Third Cinema movement of the 70s.

Born in 1945 in Beirut, Srour studied sociology at the American University in Beirut and then completed a doctorate in social anthropology at the Sorbonne, and worked as a journalist and film critic. It was there that her interest in Third World Cinema evolved, with a focus on examining the role of Arab women in Revolutions. She has made films in Oman, Vietnam, and the struggle of the Palestine people. Her first film, ‘Bread of Our Mountains’ (1968) was lost during the Lebanese Civil War. In 1974, her film Saat El Tahrir Dakkator ‘The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived’ was selected to compete at the Cannes Film Festival, making Srour the first Arab woman to have a film selected for the international festival.

Srour believes that Arab society oppressed women and kept them in a subordinate role, which prevented them from opportunities to create art. Srour advocated for women’s rights through her films, her writing, and by funding other filmmakers. Srour has been vocal about the position of women in Arab society, and in 1978, along with Tunisian director Salma Baccar and Arab cinema historian Magda Wassef, she announced a new assistance fund “for the self-expression of women in cinema.”

Heiny Srour will conduct a Masterclass, titled ‘SHOOTING UNDER DANGER. SHOOTING IN THE SITUATION OF A PIONEER’ and a screening of her film ‘Leila and the Wolves’, with 30 participants on Wednesday, September 4, 2019.