Mathilde Rouxel 

Jocelyne Saab was a French-Lebanese filmmaker and artist. She was born in Beirut, the year of the nakba - the catastrophe - for the Palestinians: her destiny seemed entirely linked to the dramatic history of the region in which she was born. She grew up in a beautiful palace, a typical example of classical Lebanese architecture, located in the western part of the city, in a very mixed neighborhood from the community point of view, but studied at the Sisters of Notre- Dame de Nazareth, on the other side of the city.

She went to Paris to study economics, but quickly decided to skip school to go to the movies. Her father had not let her study cinema. In 1973, she was sent by the French channel France 3 to make a documentary on the situation in Libya after the failure of the march launched by Gaddafi on Egypt to unify the two countries into a single republic based on the model of the United Arab Republic of Nasser. Arab speaker, English speaker, French speaker, she quickly became an asset to cover the situation in the Middle East, fully explosive. A few months later, she was sent to the front lines of the October War in Egypt and Syria, on the border with Israel, then to Iraq to cover Saddam Hussein’s war against the Kurds. She also went to film in the Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut and produced reports on their situation. On her own initiative, in 1974, she filmed Palestinian Women, in which she depicted the resistance of Palestinian women from Lebanon, both with the weapons of education and with firearms. When they discovered this document, the management of France 3 prevented its broadcast. The film was too political for French television at the time. This first act of censorship was decisive for Jocelyne Saab: she left the France 3 service and decided to shoot her documentaries independently. 

With this new motivation, she was about to leave to cover the liberation of Vietnam with two journalist friends when a bus carrying Palestinians was machine-gunned in Beirut by a far-right Christian militia. This event, which occurred on April 13, 1975, is now considered the beginning of the Lebanese civil war, which lasted 15 years. Jocelyne Saab did not go to Vietnam: she chose to go to Beirut to report on the beginnings of a war that no one, at that time, defined as such. On the Vietnamese front, her two journalist friends who had gone to cover the end of the conflict were killed. 

Lebanon in Turmoil (1975) is a feature length documentary. It is considered to be the first film made about the Lebanese civil war. In this film, exceptional for its topicality and its visionary nature, Jocelyne Saab questions all the factions of the different communities that make up Lebanon. She highlights the proliferation of militias, the growing hatred between communities, and the cynicism of political leaders, in a cinematographic style that does not lack irony and political commitment. The film was released in Paris and received rave reviews. 

The war is getting bogged down. Beirut is quickly cut in two, the Christian communities in the east of the city and the Muslim communities, joined by the militants and militiamen of the left-wing progressive forces, in the west. Immediately, Jocelyne Saab gives an account of the decay of the city in which she grew up. She made several documentaries that she sold to television stations all over the world and that were shown at festivals. She did not hesitate to go where no other journalist had gone to document the reality of the war: in the south of Lebanon, in the refugee camps, on the roads taken by the displaced populations, deprived of everything. 

Three films are emblematic of these years of war. Gathered under the name of “Beirut trilogy,” these three films with documentary writing that breaks with the classic reportage mark three historically significant times of the civil war: the first months of the war; the continuation of the war by other means and the invasion of South Lebanon by the Israeli army; then the siege of West Beirut by the Israeli army and the departure of the Palestinians from Lebanon. 

Beirut Never Again, made in 1976, is Jocelyne Saab’s first love song to the city that is hers. She travels around the city with her camera, filming its former living spaces, what remains behind the destruction. She looks for poetry in the broken glass and the disarticulated mannequins that litter the streets. She films the sea, unchanging despite the fighting. She interviews almost no one; the film is mainly guided by a voice- over, which accompanies these images by summoning, again, poetry to get out of the violence of war. For this film, as for the second in the trilogy, Jocelyne Saab enlisted the help of the Lebanese-American poet and artist Etel Adnan, who had recently published a collection of incisive poems denouncing the war: Sitt Marie-Rose, which had fascinated Jocelyne Saab by the strength of its commitment and its risk- taking in the face of the ideals of her own community. Saab knew Etel Adnan from her student days: interested in journalism, she had worked in radio and print media before joining television. It was in the offices of the newspaper Al Safa that she first met the poet, who was amused by Jocelyne Saab’s lack of rigor in writing her articles, which she nevertheless found lively and original in their approach. Saab was never a woman of writing. Their collaboration, on the occasion of Beirut Never Again and Letter from Beirut (1978), was a very happy one, since Adnan’s text gives Saab’s images a political force that goes beyond militant discourse to summon with nostalgia and humanism the necessity of living together. 

For Beirut Never Again, as for Letter from Beirut, Etel Adnan said that she had seen the images edited by Jocelyne Saab and that she had written the text of the commentary over them, in one go. This way of working shows that the editing work chosen by Jocelyne Saab from Beirut Never Again marks the beginning of a new way of documenting the war in Lebanon, not only in Saab’s career but more generally in the media panorama of the time. This sensitivity is the reason why these films are still very relevant today. 

The end of the year 1976 marked the end of the first period of the civil war, which historians refer to as the “two-year war.” At that time, the Lebanese population thought that the war was over; the progressives, whom Jocelyne Saab supported against the extreme Christian right and the interference of other armies in Lebanon, had lost. This is what the filmmaker explained about this period. Discouraged, she decided to film other struggles: she filmed Egypt in the aftermath of the bread revolt of January 1977, she left to film the struggle of the Polisario Front in the Western Sahara the same year. Then she began to dream of fiction. However, the war resumed in Lebanon: the Israeli army broke through in the south of the country and set up a buffer zone on Lebanese territory, forcing the population to leave their homes and migrate to the north. Most of them settled in Beirut. Jocelyne Saab’s family having left to take refuge on their land in the mountains, the filmmaker decided to open the family home to refugees from the South of Lebanon. The war is raging again. The urgency to testify is again imposed on her. However, Jocelyne Saab’s desire for fiction arises in the film she makes to denounce the partition of the city of Beirut and of her country in general: in Letter from Beirut, she appears herself, in a pink skirt, investigating the situation in the country. She stages situations to testify to the daily reality of the people. The commentary is again a text by Etel Adnan, on a different game: this time the text is a letter supposedly sent by Jocelyne to a friend abroad. In this film, the play with fiction allows to lighten the drama of the daily life of the Lebanese and the Palestinians, constantly pushed back and expropriated. 

With Beirut My City (1982), this lightness disappears completely. The film opens with Jocelyne Saab, but she is no longer acting: this time she is testifying in front of her burned house. We are in the middle of the siege of Beirut by the Israeli army, whose objective is to kill the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Yasser Arafat, and which has been holding sieges for two months from June 1982, with incessant bombing in the west of Beirut. Jocelyne Saab stays and films. She films until the departure of the Palestinians, who must finally leave Lebanon and withdraw their resistance to Tunis - far from Palestine. Beirut My City is violent because of what it shows of the cruelty of the Israeli army, which attacks civilians and leaves them abandoned. The commentary of this film, which gives voice to no one other than an old man determined to continue watering his plants despite the Israeli bombardments, is poignant: written by the Lebanese playwright Roger Assaf, it questions both the war and the possibility of talking about it, of making images of it. In the face of such pain, nothing is equal to it. 

After the departure of the Palestinians, Jocelyne Saab no longer wanted to film Beirut with the weapon of documentary. She moved back to Paris and worked again for a French television channel. However, she gained international recognition: in 1981, the Japanese television channel NHK commissioned her to make a documentary on the political situation in Iran, two years after the Islamic revolution. This film, entitled Iran, Utopia in Motion (1981) depicts the power of a massively manipulated people, and gives an account of the increasingly strong hold of religion on this country, where the Kurds in particular still try to resist the cultural standardization imposed by the Revolution. Jocelyne Saab’s fear of religion as a political power obviously stems from her experience in Lebanon, where the civil war is often read as a war of communities; even if Saab, who saw it as a class struggle, has always opposed this idea, she has nevertheless witnessed a fanatical rise of religion. She took this concern to Egypt, her third country of heart, where she went to film for French television both the Coptic communities in The Cross of the Pharaohs (1986) and the rise of Islamism in The Love of Allah (1986). 

The hypocrisy of the religious is also denounced in a portrait she makes at the end of the Lebanese civil war of a former extreme right-wing Christian militia member, Jocelyne Khoueiry, whom she films in her religious haven in the Lebanese Christian mountains in a short film entitled The Woman Killer (1989). 

Another woman’s portrait shows Jocelyne Saab’s exceptional ability to distance herself from all forms of ideology. When, for The Lady of Saigon (1997), she set out to film Dr. Hoa, a former Vietnamese maquis and then a communist minister after liberation, she retraced the courageous journey of a doctor fighting against inequality, but did not fall into the pitfalls of a hagiographic portrait. Other people’s revolutions also have darker sides that we must criticize. 

At the end of her life, Jocelyne Saab turned to contemporary art. After her third fictional film Dunia, shot in 2005 in Cairo, she made several photographic series and short art videos. Imaginary Postcard (2016), shot during an artistic residency she led in Turkey, is one of her latest works. At the confluence of East and West, obsessed with the mesmerizing bridge that crosses the Bosphorus from the Asian to the European shore of the city of Istanbul, Jocelyne Saab tells her own story. She is like the bridge that has always linked the East to the West, Paris to Beirut or Cairo, speaking French in Beirut but militating ardently to remind the Lebanese that Lebanon is a country of Asia: the identity of this region of the world is complex and tortured by its geopolitical position. In this very short and moving film, Saab recounts her illness, her fragility and the fragility of the world she will leave behind after her death. Jocelyne Saab passed away on January 7, 2019 from cancer and leaves behind a prolific and essential work for the history of the region as well as for the history of cinema.