The journalist and filmmaker Jocelyne Saab, who was born in 1948 in Beirut and died in 2019 in Paris, was active as a war correspondent from the beginning of the 1970s. She created an oeuvre which is both a chronicle and a political reflection.
Our program encompasses six films and comprises two parts. The first, the “Beirut Trilogy” – BEYROUTH, JAMAIS PLUS (Beirut, Never Again, 1976), LETTRE DE BEYROUTH (Letter from Beirut, 1978), BEYROUTH, MA VILLE (Beirut, My City, 1982) – documents the Lebanese Civil War from within: ruins at dawn, a destroyed house, a family history erased.
The second part is a collection of films about the Middle East in a state of upheaval: LES ENFANTS DE LA GUERRE (Children of War, 1976) about a generation that grew up in conflict; IRAN, L’UTOPIE EN MARCHE (Iran, Utopia in the Making, 1980) about the ambivalence of a revolution, in which the future mechanisms of control and oppression are already ermerging; and ÉGYPTE, LA CITÉ DES MORTS (Egypt, City of the Dead, 1977) about those people who live among tombs in the Cairo necropolis on the margins of society.
Saab’s cinema is one that thinks from the perspective of the Other, and – as Nicole Brenez has recognized – is driven by a combination of love for the victims and irony regarding those in power. These are films which today take on a new sense of urgency.
