Cinema is drawn to the flicker of rebellion more than the machinery of revolution. The intimacy of a camera lens captures the tremor of an individual act – a woman smuggling weapons into preparations for a wedding, a poet persisting in his introspection and his art in spite of the sweep of wider political movements around him – far more contagiously than the culmination of broader revolutionary or resistant struggles. Sergei Eisenstein’s October, for example, succeeded in pioneering a new visual grammar of montage for an era that sought to remake a people, liberating their sense of history and their senses themselves from the constraints of a bourgeois, capitalist worldview, yet its disjointed narrative and absence of any central characters left audiences alienated. Even the titan of revolutionary cinema, The Battle of Algiers, featured neither individual heroes nor villains (characters are types rather than personalities), with the camera maintaining a cool, observational tone, like news footage. The film’s struggle (a flashback framed by the French army’s final crackdown) likewise denies the viewer emotional closure. They emblematised revolution yet kept their viewers at an arm’s length. 

       Leila and the Wolves and The Colour of Pomegranates, by contrast, captivated viewers at home and abroad and are widely considered not only cinematic masterpieces but integral to the mosaic of modern national identity through culture for Lebanon/Palestine and Armenia respectively. I argue that these films succeed because they collapse the dichotomy between individual acts of resistance and the sweep of wider political movements by presenting their protagonists as metonyms for their respective cultures. Leila is not an individual heroine but a conduit through which generations of Arab women are remembered; Sayat-Nova is less a historical poet than the embodiment of Armenian cultural soul. Both films engage deeply with resistance and indicate that it can be cultural as well as physical, personal as well as political, and – in doing so on-screen – they knowingly construct a counter-archive infused with the very symbols of their people that are at risk of erasure. Additionally, the production and dissemination of both Leila and the Wolves and The Colour of Pomegranates – both of which faced considerable difficulties securing funding and permission - can be understood as individual acts of resistance, being banned and censored many times and achieving most acclaim and support away from home.

         The political and cultural contexts of Leila and the Wolves and The Colour of Pomegranates are central to understanding why both films foreground individual acts of resistance rather than the totality of collective movements. Srour’s film emerges from the politically turbulent 1970s and 1980s Middle East, particularly the Lebanese Civil War and the Palestinian struggle for liberation, at a moment when women’s participation in revolutionary movements was largely excluded from both official histories and cinematic representation. By centring Leila’s time-travel through personal encounters and forgotten narratives, Srour highlights the fragmented and precarious nature of resistance under colonial and patriarchal regimes: the movement exists, but its female agents remain invisible. The historical erasure of women, combined with Srour’s position as a Lebanese woman filmmaker navigating diasporic and exilic conditions, shapes a cinema in which individual memory becomes the locus of political power, rather than heroic collective action.

         Parajanov, in contrast, creates The Colour of Pomegranates under the pressures of Soviet Armenia in the 1960s, a context defined by state-imposed socialist realism, cultural centralisation, and the suppression of national identity. His refusal of conventional narrative and historical biography, replacing it with tableaux of ritual, iconography, and poetic symbolism, is itself a form of aesthetic resistance: each frozen image asserts Armenian cultural and spiritual identity against the homogenising ideology of the Soviet state. Whereas Srour foregrounds relational memory and temporal weaving, Parajanov preserves endangered traditions through spatial and visual permanence, insisting that culture survives in images as much as in revolutionary action.

         The production histories of Leila and the Wolves and The Colour of Pomegranates further illustrate how each film embodies individual acts of resistance, not only on screen but in its creation. Srour faced significant institutional and cultural obstacles: as a Lebanese woman filmmaker in the early 1980s, she contended with limited access to funding, patriarchal censorship, and cynicism from both national and international producers about a film centring Arab women in revolutionary histories. Her work was largely independent, and she relied on archival research, interviews, and creative reconstruction to give visibility to figures omitted from dominant narratives. The production lasted seven years and involved “shooting under the bullets of the Lebanese civil war and the brewing civil war”, which “complicated everything”.These challenges shaped the film’s fragmented, multi-layered form: montage, temporal dislocation, and hybrid documentary-dramatic techniques were not only stylistic choices but also pragmatic solutions, reflecting both resource limitations and the precarious political terrain. The act of filming itself - navigating war-torn Lebanon, reconstructing events erased from history - mirrors the acts of resistance she depicts, turning production into praxis.

         Similarly, Parajanov encountered formidable political pressures under the Soviet regime. The Colour of Pomegranates was censored, criticised for “formalism,” and Parajanov himself would later face imprisonment, in part because his aesthetic refusal challenged the ideological mandates of socialist realism. His meticulous compositions, use of non-professional actors, and extreme stylisation were acts of defiance: each frame preserved Armenian culture and poetic identity in the face of a state demanding uniformity. The obstacles he faced, from state scrutiny to the threat of personal persecution, mirror the same themes of survival and resistance his film enacts. Even the choice of Sayat Nova as the film’s locus is significant given Sayat-Nova’s murder in 1795 occurred as he was told to convert from Christianity to Islam and refused, declaring his religion and identity unassailably Armenian Christian in a way that Parajanov, filming at a time when Armenian identity was once again under threat, would have understood as deeply resonant and symbolic. 

          Parajanov deliberately replaces conventional political narrative and historical biography with symbolic iconography, transforming the poet Sayat-Nova into a living visual myth. Rather than telling a linear story of his life, the film stages meticulously composed tableaux in which rituals, textiles, manuscripts, and sacred objects carry meaning through their formal arrangement rather than narrative exposition. In doing so, Parajanov resists the collectivist, didactic demands of Soviet realism, asserting a private, national imaginary that prioritises Armenian cultural memory over ideological conformity. Each frame functions simultaneously as a cultural artefact and a cinematic declaration of survival: the persistence of identity is enacted through art itself, rather than through overt political commentary. Sayat-Nova becomes more than a historical figure; he stands as a metonym for both Armenian cultural continuity and the artist himself, embodying Parajanov’s own struggle for aesthetic autonomy under a regime that sought to subsume individuality within uniform ideological narratives. The poet’s gestures, postures, and interactions with objects carry a symbolic weight that transforms biography into mythopoetic resistance, where survival and defiance are enacted in stillness and form rather than action. In this way, The Colour of Pomegranates exemplifies how cinema can convey resistance through its very visual and structural choices: by privileging iconography over plot, the film asserts that the act of creation itself - the careful composition of image, colour, and ritual - becomes a site of defiance, preserving what ideology would erase and asserting the enduring power of culture, identity, and artistry.

           Heiny Srour’s Leila and the Wolves likewise not only retrieves the erased women of Arab resistance but reclaims the very forms through which women have historically narrated survival. The film can be read as a modern reconfiguration of The One Thousand and One Nights, in which Scheherazade’s nightly storytelling delays death through the act of narration. Like Scheherazade, Leila resists oblivion by telling. Yet, where the earlier heroine tells to defer her own execution, Srour’s protagonist gathers and reanimates the fragmented memories of others. The film becomes a collective Scheherazadean gesture, a deferral of historical annihilation through storytelling. Its structure, episodic and recursive, recalls the rhythms of oral narrative: repetition with variation, digressions that loop back to the same traumas, a patterning of memory rather than a chronology of events. The film’s voice-over, often detached from visible speakers, suggests the circulation of story across generations: a chorus of inherited remembrance rather than individual authorship.

         This oral rhythm finds a visual counterpart in the Palestinian tradition of tatreez, the embroidery through which women have long inscribed history and geography into fabric. Each cut, transition, and juxtaposition in Srour’s montage functions as a stitch: fragments of time and space interwoven into a resistant textile of recollection. The domestic image of weaving becomes an epistemic metaphor: knowledge as something made by hand, patterned, and passed on. Srour thus feminises historiography itself: history is not written but woven, not archived but retold. The camera becomes a needle, the celluloid strip a fabric upon which women’s suppressed acts of resistance are sutured into visibility. In merging oral, visual, and textile languages, Srour transforms cinema into a loom of memory: a medium through which the threads of women’s individual acts of resistance are synthesised into the sweep of wider political movements.

         While Srour’s film weaves fragmented memories into a temporal and tactile continuum, Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates enacts resistance through spatial and visual stasis, transforming biography into a tableau of national and spiritual endurance. Where Leila and the Wolves draws on montage to interlace individual acts into a collective memory, Pomegranates suspends time entirely, allowing each frame to function as an autonomous icon. Sayat-Nova is less a historical figure than a vessel for Armenian cultural survival: manuscripts, ritual objects, and gestures are arranged with the precision of illuminated miniatures, their symbolism encoding defiance against Soviet attempts at homogenisation. Whereas Srour’s camera moves through space and time like a needle threading a tapestry, Parajanov’s compositions freeze the flow of history, insisting that identity - cultural, artistic, and spiritual - can endure in stillness as much as in action. In both films, the form of resistance is inseparable from the political: in Srour, montage enacts feminist historiography; in Parajanov, iconography enacts cultural preservation. Yet the contrast is instructive: Srour celebrates temporal weaving and relational memory, whereas Parajanov celebrates visual stasis and monumental permanence. Together, they suggest that cinema’s political power does not depend on linear narrative or collective spectacle but on its capacity to materialise memory and identity, whether through motion or immobility, stitch or tableau. Both approaches reclaim what dominant histories attempt to erase, suggesting that individual acts of remembrance can articulate resistance as powerfully as the sweep of wider political movements.