Portrait of Gaddafi, The Man Coming From The Desert
1973A detailed portrait of a young head of state and admirer of Nasser during the first days of the construction of a modern state in Libya.
Jocelyne Saab (1975–2019) had a career as a journalist, war reporter, documentary filmmaker, fiction filmmaker, photographer, visual artist, and cultural activist.
She was born in 1948 and grew up in Beirut. In 1973, she became a war reporter in the Middle East, covering the October War for a television channel in France. In 1975, she directed her first feature-length documentary, Lebanon in Turmoil, which was released in cinemas in Paris and distributed by Pascale Dauman. She then went on to cover the Lebanese Civil War for fifteen years, during which time she directed almost thirty films, including Beirut, Never Again, broadcast on France 2 in 1976, Letter from Beirut and Beirut, My City, broadcast on France 3 between 1978 and 1982. In 1977 both Egypt, The City of the Dead and The Sahara is Not for Sale were shot and released in cinemas in Paris. In 1981, during the days following the Iranian revolution, she shot Iran, Utopia on the Move , which received several international prizes. In 1998, she went to Vietnam and directed The Lady of Saigon, which was awarded the title of Best French Documentary by the French senate. It was broadcast on France 2 and in many international festivals.
During a period of less than thirty years, Jocelyne Saab directed thirty documentaries that were awarded prizes in European and international festivals. However, her filmography is not limited to documentaries: in 1981, Jocelyne Saab had her first opportunity to turn to fiction as Volker Schlöndorff’s assistant director for his film Circle of Deceit, shot in Beirut during the war. In 1985, she went on to direct her own first feature film, A Suspended Life, selected during the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes the same year and released in three cinemas in Paris. In 1993, she dedicated a docufiction to the centennial anniversary of cinema, Once Upon a Time, Beirut: Story of a Star, which is made up mostly of archival images and rushes from old films set in Beirut before the Civil War. The film was broadcast on ARTE.
In 2005, her film Dunia, shot in Egypt and produced by Catherine Dussart, which deals with pleasure as a central theme, provoked a scandal which resulted in Saab being sentenced to death by Egyptian fundamentalists. Nevertheless, the film was praised in many international festivals, and was amongst the feature films competing at the Sundance Festival in the US. Five years later, Dunia had become a cult film in the Arab world. In 2007, Jocelyne Saab turned to contemporary art, and put together her first video installation on twenty-two screens at the National Museum of Singapore. A retrospective look at the entirety of her works on the war, it is entitled Strange Games and Bridges. Shortly after, she exhibited her first photographs at the Abu Dhabi fair in 2007, followed by exhibitions at the Art-Paris fair and in galleries in Abu Dhabi and Beirut in 2008.
In 2009, she finished a new feature film, What’s Going On?, shot in her city of birth. In it, she questioned the possibility of Beirut’s rebirth, and more generally the process of creation in all its depth. In 2013, she taught at IESAV, the Institute of Performance and Audiovisual Studies in Beirut, where she directed a feature film with students about the charismatic figure of Henri Barakat. In 2013, she directed six films on the theme of sex and gender in six cities in the Levant, reunited under the title Café du Genre for the exhibition Au Bazar du Genre at the MuCEM in Marseille.
Throughout her life, she organized a number of significant events. In 1992, she engaged in the rebuilding of the Lebanese Film Archive. To this end, she catalogued over 250 films that mention Beirut and Lebanon before, during and after the War. She was awarded the title of Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters for this monumental work, which she achieved while simultaneously editing her own film, Once Upon a Time, Beirut. The film used footage from the archives and stands as a testament to the depth of her involvement in the project. Using the same archives, she also organized the cycle of projections “Beirut, One Thousand and One Images” at the Arab World Institute in 1993, an event that presented all the Arab films selected to be included in the Lebanese Film Archive. In 2013, she founded the International Festival of Cultural Resistance, of which she was also president and artistic director. She used the festival to screen Asian and Mediterranean films that through their plot pose questions about the situation in contemporary Beirut and its history. A cinema that heals the country’s wounds and makes us think about the possibility of peace and respect between communities. This festival spread across the entire Lebanese territory.
Towards the end of her life, she directed a last series of photographs, One Dollar a Day, and several artistic videos: One Dollar a Day and Imaginary Postcard in 2016, and My Name is Mei Shigenobu, which was released posthumously in 2019. During her last years, she was working on a documentary about the hidden life of Mei Shigenobu, Shigenobu, Mother and Daughter.
Months after the incident on April 13th 1975, during which Palestinian civilians were gunned down by the Phalangist militia, the numbers are even more horrifying: 6,000 dead, 20,000 injured, daily kidnappings and a capital city half destroyed. This film, a unique documentation of the Lebanese Civil War, goes back to the origins of the conflict as seen by a society that went to war singing and with their heads held high.
During the period in which I started to work as an independent filmmaker, after having worked for different television companies (French, Lebanese) as a sort of apprentice, the Lebanese Civil War started (1975). I knew that it was at the same time the end of an era and of a country, and I wanted to recount that by taking a path that was absolutely not a militant one, even if some people said that it was, perhaps as a result of the clumsiness of my explanations. I don’t believe in militant films because they are addressed to a category of people who are already convinced, and I, by contrast, wanted to gain the interest at wider groups.
Portrait of a French mercenary working in Libya, hired by the Phalange to train the militias. War leaves its traces, and for some, who see death as part of the job, it’s a vocation.
The ceasefire declared on October 21st, 1976 gives the fedayin the opportunity to reclaim what had been Fatah territory until it was abandoned in 1970, from the right-wing militia. Syrians and Israelis join together to neutralize this “autonomous force” of Palestinians and impose a siege on two Lebanese frontier villages, Hanine and Kfarchouba, before attacking them.
1976 marks the beginning of Beirut’s calvary. With a child’s eyes the filmmaker follows for six months the daily destruction of the city’s walls. Every morning, between 6 and 10am she roams around Beirut while the militia from both sides rest from their night of fighting.
Days after the massacre in Karantina, a predominantly Muslim shanty town in Beirut, Jocelyne Saab finds and meets children who have escaped, and who are deeply traumatized by the horrific fighting they have seen with their own eyes. Jocelyne gives the children crayons and encourages them to draw while her camera rolls. She makes a bitter discovery: the only games the children engage in are war games. The war would quickly become a way of life for them as well.
It was in 1976. The massacre took place in Karantina, a neighbourhood in Beirut. The combatants drank champagne over the corpses. They talked about “deratting” this bidonville at the outskirts of Beirut. What language can we choose to talk to children when they have just escaped a massacre? How can we approach them without turning them into circus animals? But also, what can we do for these Lebanese and Palestinian children who have been scarred? How can we hold out a hand of hope?
Words collected by Zahraa Mortada in Beirut in 2011.
Portrait of Raymond Eddé, candidate for the Presidential elections and fervent opponent of the war. During the 1975-1976 conflicts he and his team had actively searched for people killed in the war, whether they were Christian, Druze or Muslim.
This documentary from the heart of the desert shows the conflict between the Algerians and the Moroccans at El-Aiounet, the Saharan resistance on the Polisario Front.
The shooting of this film was spread out over three shoots from July to November 1977, with a reduced crew. I was 29. The film had taken us to Morocco with the Royal Armed Forces, to the Saharan provinces of Saguia el-Hamra, to Mauritania with the army of Mokhtar Ould Daddah in the Rio de Oro and Zouérate, and then eventually twice, in September and November 1977, to the liberated territories of the West Sahara with the combatants of the Polisario Front.
This documentary, at 52 minutes long, constitutes a substantiated record of the problem of the West Sahara, a former Spanish colony that is now shared between Morocco and Mauritania.
I wanted to show the nature of this absurd war that pitted two regular armies over an area of 280,000km against a handful of Polisario resistance fighters. It's like the atmosphere of the Tartar desert as Dino Buzzati recounts it, but in this case the enemy isn't hypothetical, on the contrary, it's a permanent threat.
This film reminds the viewer of the existence of a Saharan people and of their will to gain self-determination. It's the waking of a national conscience shaping itself in the face of war. The Sahara is Not for Sale also contains a political and economic analysis of the conflict that is as much linked to the internal situation of the countries in question, as to the bigger picture of the regional and international situation.
Text written when the film was released in 1978
In this portrait of Cairo, “mother of the world”, Jocelyne Saab searches for the city’s origins. While her own city, Beirut, is being torn to pieces, in the City of the Dead she finds the traces of lifestyles and traditions that are also disappearing in the face of increased globalization.
Jocelyne Saab films the city of Beirut destroyed by Israeli bombing, revealing the extent of the destruction and the suffering of the victims.
Reza, a photographer from the SIPA Agency disguises himself as a stretcher-bearer and is able to infiltrate the Palestinian refugee camps of Rashidiyyeh and al-Buss near Tyre and Saida in Lebanon, at the moment of the Israeli attack. The horrors that Reza witnesses, and that his photos reveal, leave him deeply traumatized. Back in France he speaks about his experiences on camera to Jocelyne Saab. He describes a scene of collective denunciation and a round-up organized by the Israeli army in Saida.
In July 1982 the Israeli army laid siege to Beirut. Four years earlier Jocelyne Saab saw her 150-year-old childhood home go up in flames. She asked herself: when did all this begin? Every place becomes a historical site and every name a memory.
A portrait of the Copts, the oldest Christian community in Egypt, their links to ancient Egypt and, in the face of rising Islamic fundamentalism, their traditions and ways of confronting this growing threat to their existence.
Alexandria: by turn Hellenistic, Greek, Roman, Copt… and then a petit Paris at the end of the 1930s. Inspired by the texts of Cavaffi and Lawrence Durrell, this is a portrait of a city that has long been at the heart of the Arab world.
Humiliated by the 1967 defeat, the Egyptian people look for ways to rebuild their sense of identity. Religion seems to point the way for them: Jocelyne Saab portrays the success of the Muslim Brotherhood and the increasingly rigid cultural values taking over Cairo at the end of the 1980s.
The architect and philosopher Olivier Sednaoui, disciple of Hassan Fathi, explains how he built his mud-brick house, which brings together the infinitely small and the infinitely huge, as the Egyptians did in the age of the Pharaohs. This form of harmony, largely forgotten by the end of this 20th century, is what Sednaoui is trying to rediscover. He explains the project from the molding of the very first mud brick to the life philosophy on which it is based: placing East and West under one single destiny.
