Following the success of its first training workshops, held in Beirut in 2021 and 2024, the Jocelyne Saab Association has joined forces within the Archive Circulation Initiative with the Tunisian production company Muja Films and the Digital Archives of Algerian Cinema project to continue training film practitioners in digital film restoration. Their first project together aimed to be held in Tunis in 2025.
The Archive Circulation Initiative is a proposal for collaboration between three structures working in the same direction: the Jocelyne Saab Association, which has been working since 2019 to train new skills in terms of film preservation and restoration in Lebanon, having enabled the restoration by a largely Lebanese team of 15 documentary films by Jocelyne Saab, released on DVD in 2024; the Digital Archives of Algerian Cinema project, which has been working for over ten years to collect and distribute archives on the history of Algerian cinema, and the Tunisian independent production company Muja Films, which works to set up alternative production and distribution networks in the Arab world and Africa.
The collective is a union of forces led by the active members of the three partner organizations:
Muja Films is a Tunis-based production company founded by Dhia Jerbi. After studying at the Lussas documentary film school, he made his first short film, which won awards at international festivals. In 2024, he released his first feature-length documentary, “Derrière le soleil”. In 2022, he cofounded Muja Films with Manon Lavaud, which has since expanded to Marseille and Tunis to create further virtuous connections and foster an evenhanded exchange.
The Digital Archive of Algerian Cinema is a project by Nabil Djedouani, a filmmaker and archivist based between France and Algeria. He holds a degree in film restoration from the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (France). He has carried out major projects involving participatory collection and digitization of film archives in Algeria, and is actively involved in the circulation of films from the history of Algerian cinema. He is artistic director of the Rencontres cinématographiques de Béjaia.
The Association Jocelyne Saab is directed by Mathilde Rouxel, who holds a PhD in the history of cinema in Arab countries and has been entrusted with the artistic work of Jocelyne Saab since the artist’s death in 2019. She teaches ethics and practice of film restoration at Lille 3 University (France). She is artistic director of the Aflam festival in Marseille and the Noisy-le-Sec Franco-Arab film festival in the Paris region. As part of her commitment to the association, she has run several training series in film preservation and restoration for technicians from Arab countries, in partnership with various Lebanese institutions and in collaboration with major archive centers (FIAF technical committee, Swiss film archives).
The aim is to offer different film archives across the region the opportunity to participate in the digitization of their holdings and the restoration of films they feel are important, while also participating in their programming at various events around the world. This project accompanies and complements the myriad of initiatives currently underway in most countries of the region, working to establish means of preserving, conserving and circulating films from the history of Arab cinema.
Developing new skills in the field of digital restoration, in countries where the postproduction industry is already well established, seems to us to be a logical and necessary continuation of projects already underway. This institution-independent method, which can be taken up by everyone, also breaks free from the traditional models of laboratory restoration, which are very costly and non-collaborative, and which to date seem to be holding back the re-emergence of marginalized images from the region.
By giving Lebanese technicians who have recently turned professional in the field of digital restoration the opportunity to share their know-how with technicians from the region, this training workshop also enables the emergence of common discussions around the region’s cinematographic heritage and relationship to images. For several years now, contemporary filmmaking in Arab countries has shown a prodigious interest in archive images and what they tell us about the world we live in. By restoring these images, we are developing new creative potential.
Other than the first two aspects of training and safeguarding the films of our region that are in urgent need to such initiatives, we imagine to give a second life to these films and introduce them to the public both in our regions and worldwide. The idea is to showcase the restored films in film festivals (MENA region & worldwide) in different film festivals as a parallel section or a retrospective depending on the restored material. Then, we plan to edit the films in DVDs coffrets and sell them to be able to give a monetary reward to the right holders and to permit the films a second life.
