Leila is the first short fiction film from Jewish writer Leila Segal and Palestinian-British filmmaker Saeed Taji Farouky. The film is now in pre-production, raising funds for the filming of a pitch tape, which begins shooting in January of 2010.

Synopsis
A man and a woman meet in East Jerusalem and begin a passionate relationship that descends into abuse. The Man is Palestinian, wanted by occupying authorities; the woman is Leila – whose identity is ambiguous. When the Man meets Leila in a hotel room, she is his Jewish lover; when they meet in a house, she is his Arab wife.

The Man’s experience at the hands of his political oppressors becomes the template for his relationship with Leila – who alternately interrogates and submits to him. One morning, police burst in on the couple as they lie together in the hotel room. It is unclear, during a final brutal interrogation, whether Leila has betrayed the man – but the two leave the room together anyway.

Leila invites us to view war and intimacy as reverse sides of the same coin. The political interrogations and those between the lovers are merely reflections of each other. The fractured political landscape in which they exist is transposed to intimate territory, where neither is safe, rules are broken and power abused.

Drawn from the filmmakers’ personal experience, Leila charts the brutal personal cost of war – the lovers’ damaged intimacy exposing trauma that has been transmitted through generations. Leila acknowledges the importance of ethnicity – but asks us to question the cost of our attachment to it.

Background
The idea for Leila came when Saeed and Leila met in Jerusalem, as they worked on Palestinian-Israeli dialogue projects. Both had experienced interrogations on entry to, and exit from, Israel, and wanted to create a drama that reflected the transgressive intimacy of these experiences, transposing them from the political to the personal domain.

Leila’s Arabic name is a source of suspicion when she travels to Israel. Security services often question her about it at length, unable to conceive of an ‘innocent’ reason for a Jewish woman having an Arabic name. The script of Leila reflects this confusion, its interrogatory dialogue forming a poetic refrain using the name Leila, symbol of national identity to some, and instrument of political oppression to others.

In Leila we are never on solid ground – the shifting identity of the female character is reflected through the shifting, uncertain tone of the film. We are never quite sure which woman the man is with, or to which he is most drawn – his Jewish lover or his Arab wife – the forbidden and the familiar, who are really one and the same.