Film Screenings / Programs / Retrospectives
THE FILMS OF JOCELYNE SAAB
December 6 – December 12
December 6-12, 2024
The filmmaker Jocelyne Saab (1948-2019) was born in Lebanon and trained as a war reporter for French television, becoming one of the few women producing politically-committed documentaries across the Middle East and North Africa. This retrospective traces the distinct filmmaking periods in her long and contradictory career.
In Saab’s early documentary work, she chronicled the Polisario Front in the Western Sahara’s struggle against Moroccan annexation (THE SAHARA IS NOT FOR SALE [1977]); the impoverishment of the people of Cairo by President Anwar Sadat’s infitah policies of economic liberalization and accelerated private investment (EGYPT, CITY OF THE DEAD [1977]); and the Palestinian resistance struggle in Lebanon (PALESTINIAN WOMEN [1974] and REJECTION FRONT [1975]).
After the onset of the Lebanese civil war, Saab directed a trilogy of films – BEIRUT, NEVER AGAIN (1976), LETTER FROM BEIRUT (1978), and BEIRUT, MY CITY (1982) – documenting the harrowing effects of class revanchism, Phalangist fascism, and Zionist occupation on the country. Alongside contemporaries like Maroun Baghdadi, Christian Ghazi, and Borhane Alaouié, Saab attempted to make sense of the war in Lebanon. She was, herself, no less imbricated in the story: “Everything was suddenly annihilated,” she recalled in a series of interviews, “our family’s domicile, off the map, gone from the city, a mass of ruins.”
Later in her career, Saab turned to feature films – including A SUSPENDED LIFE (1985) – and experimental video, which are presented in fragments, the product of a mind disillusioned by the false promises of the war decades. Taken as a whole, the films are an archive of the de-development of the Arab world and of images blasted apart by historical conjuncture.
Guest-programmed by Kaleem Hawa, who wrote the introduction above, in collaboration with Giovanni Vimercati and ArteEast. This series is co-presented by ArteEast (https://arteeast.org/). The individual program descriptions below are by Giovanni Vimercati.
The films of Jocelyne Saab are presented courtesy of the Jocelyne Saab Association (http://jocelynesaab.org).
Special thanks to Mathilde Rouxel, Jinane Mrad, and Louise Malherbe (Jocelyne Saab Association); Kaleem Hawa; Giovanni Vimercati; and Ginou Choueiri (ArteEast).
