LANDMARKS OF MEMORY: THE CINEMA OF JOCELYNE SAAB 

It is difficult to sum up a filmmaker’s artistic output, let alone one whose life and work gravitated around the complex entanglement of history and geopolitics that marked the Middle East post-WW2 (or who started her career filming a candid portrait of Muammar Gaddafi and ten years later was the only cameraperson allowed to film Yasser Arafat’s sea-bound exile from Lebanon). In the case of Jocelyne Saab, one of the Arab world’s most important documentary filmmakers, the task is slightly less arduous, for her body of work is marked by a compelling distillation of the multifaceted vicissitudes of war, religion, and politics, and an effortless dedication to examining the humanity that lives beneath the din of ideology and conflict. 

Born and raised in Beirut, educated at the Sorbonne, she began working as a journalist until the beginning of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990), which led to her switch to documentary film as her main form of expression. Coloured with an attuned sense of irony and affection, Saab’s films veered away from documentary’s journalistic tendencies to imbue it with essayistic poetry and a deeply personal commitment to give voice to those affected by war and those who resist, to the exiled, the dispossessed and the poor. Hers was a cinema rooted in the immediacy and urgency of the present, instinctively aware of the medium’s ability to resist history’s indifference to individual suffering. More than ‘documents,’ Jocelyne Saab’s films are empowering imprints of personal and collective memory that (even more so retrospectively) reclaim humanity from the residual sweep of history’s grand narratives.

As her cinematic map expanded ever more outward from Lebanon, to Europe, Africa, and Asia, Beirut remained its focal centre – a city and home she devoted most of her career and often returned to (e.g. starting the Cultural Resistance International Film Festival in 2012). More than an observer of the changing history of a city and a nation, Saab captured portraits of ordinary people, of life that insists on preserving its joy and dignity, of humanity that defies the ruins of war. 

She carried the weight of being an Arab woman, war correspondent, and independent filmmaker with fortitude, despite the many death threats she had received throughout her career (most notably for her Sundance-nominated fiction film DUNIA, in which she explored female desire, pleasure, and sexuality in the context of Islam). 

Her untimely passing in 2019 was followed by posthumous retrospectives at DocLisboa and Lincoln Center, as well as the recently- published book “ReFocus: The Films of Jocelyne Saab” (ed. Mathilde Rouxel, Stefanie Van de Peer). 

“Landmarks of memory” borrows its title from Lebanese poetess Etel Adnan’s narration of BEIRUT NEVER AGAIN: a reference to the city’s ruined vestiges (“Nothing disappears totally... they are the landmarks of memory”), it is a fitting description of Saab’s body of work and the curatorial direction taken by One World Romania.

Programs 1 & 2 document Saab’s coverage of the Lebanese Civil War from its onset (LEBANON IN TURMOIL (1975)) to its unravelling over the next decade (‘The Beirut Trilogy’ – BEIRUT NEVER AGAIN (1976), LETTER FROM BEIRUT (1978) and BEIRUT, MY CITY (1982)). Seen together in sequence, their potency of expressing the destructive force of war and resilience of life is matched by the artistic progression of Saab’s cinematic approach. The poetic wedges driven within her compelling reportage of LEBANON IN TURMOIL break through and splinter off in the Beirut Trilogy, fleshing out cinematic and thematic traits that would come to characterise her work – ‘sensibility over sentimentality,’ the passage of time, dialectical framing, and montage. 

Program 3 continues chronologically to focus on Saab’s documentation of the regime changes and their socio-cultural consequences in neighbouring Egypt and Iran. Once again, Saab’s objective rigour yields incredible access to the nascent rise of Islamism with unwavering curiosity and candidness, placing her at the centre of history-in-the-making. 

Program 4 serves a three-fold objective as the epilogue to the viewer’s foray into Jocelyne Saab’s oeuvre. At first apparent glance, it is meant as a collective portrait of, and homage to, the militant women and female figures that had been the focus of Saab’s filmography over the course of 40 years. A closer reading of the films and their chronological succession reveals a bittersweet bookending that spans her filmography – from 1974’s PALESTINIAN WOMEN to 2016’s IMAGINARY POSTCARD. More importantly, it is an inspiring summation of her life’s work, her resolute inquiry into the life drive to resist – be it against political, spiritual, systemic
or natural forces. It reveals the lifelong creation of a true cinema of resistance – of a commitment to seek and investigate the embodiment of defiance, within the borders of the concrete and abstract. 

(Andrei Tănăsescu) 

JOCELYNE SAAB 1
Libanul în criză / Lebanon in Turmoil 
Liban / Lebanon, 1975, 75 min 

JOCELYNE SAAB 2
Beirut niciodată / Beirut, Never Again 
Liban / Lebanon, 1976, 35 min 

Scrisoare din Beirut / Letter from Beirut 
Liban / Lebanon, 1978, 52 min 

Beirut, orașul meu / Beirut, My City 
Liban / Lebanon, 1982, 37 min 

JOCELYNE SAAB 3
Copții, Crucea faraonilor / The Pharaohs’ Cross
Franța / France, 1986, 16 min 

Iubirea lui Allah / The Love of Allah
Franța / France, 1986, 17 min 

Iran: Utopia în mișcare / Iran, Utopia in the Making 
Liban / Lebanon, 1980, 52 min 

JOCELYNE SAAB 4
Femeile palestiniene / Palestinian Women 
Franța / France, 1974, 15 min 

Ucigașa / The Woman Killer 
Franța / France, 1988, 10 min 

Doamna din Saigon / The Lady of Saigon 
Franța / France, 1998, 60 min 

Carte poștală imaginară / Imaginary Postcard 
Turcia / Turkey, 2016, 6 min