In 2013, at a time when the Arab Spring uprisings, the war in Syria and political tensions were affecting Lebanon, Jocelyne Saab founded the Cultural Resistance International Film Festival of Lebanon in Tripoli. Having documented conflicts, exile and struggles, she aims to promote the circulation and transmission of cinema from Asia and the Mediterranean region through the festival, which then expanded to Beirut, Saïda, Tyre and Zahle until 2015. True to her multidisciplinary approach, Jocelyne Saab also launched the future International Biennale for Cinema and the Arts in Lebanon in 2016. Centred on the theme ‘A Break with the Representation of Reality’, the competition took place within the unfinished structures of the Tripoli International Fair, designed by the architect Oscar Niemeyer.
It was also during this period that recognition of Jocelyne Saab’s work took on a new dimension. Olivier Hadouchi and Nicole Brenez organised the first retrospective of her films at the Cinémathèque française, entitled “Les astres de la guerre”. That same year, Nicole Brenez noted that Jocelyne Saab’s work “in the service of the destitute, displaced peoples, exiled combatants, cities at war, and the voiceless underclass […] carried out in complete independence […] now demands to be restored and preserved”. These early efforts found symbolic resonance when the filmmaker was appointed an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters in 2016: “Today more than ever, the title bestowed upon me proves that the vigilance of filmmakers and artists is indispensable.”
In 2015, Jocelyne Saab accompanied a friend on a humanitarian mission to the refugee camps in the Bekaa Valley, near the Syrian border. She quickly began to consider shifting the perspective on these populations, who had been rendered invisible by the constant repetition of media images: “We are bombarded with war photos every day, to such an extent that we look at them without really seeing them.” Through a succession of static shots, slow-motion sequences and photographs, she constructs “a sort of grimly realistic fiction” lasting six minutes. The film was accompanied by an exhibition at the Institut français in Beirut in 2017, in which the photographs—embellished with gold leaf and paint—transform refugee children into icons embodying dignity.
Made in Istanbul the same year, Imaginary Postcard takes the form of a filmed letter addressed to the writer Orhan Pamuk. Whilst the camera looks out over the Bosphorus from the bridge linking the European and Asian shores of Istanbul, Jocelyne Saab recounts the plight of Syrian refugees crossing a border that could close at any moment. As part of the Lebanon Contemporary Art Biennale, the two short films are brought together at the MACAM in Alita, during the retrospective exhibition Jocelyne Saab: Against the Tide, curated by Mathilde Rouxel in 2018. The interplay between Jocelyne Saab’s films, photographs, installations, archives and visual artworks presents a body of work that moves fluidly from one language to another, renewing our perception of reality: ‘art is a kind of drift […] one artistic discipline gives birth to another, and so on’.
Despite the illness that was weakening her, Jocelyne Saab devoted the final months of her life to writing a project on the life of Mei Shigenobu, daughter of Fusako Shigenobu, founder of the Japanese Red Army. The film was intended to recount her clandestine childhood in Lebanon, within the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, using a mix of archive footage, testimonies, drawings and excerpts from other films. Unable to continue due to her illness, Jocelyne Saab chose to preserve this research in the form of a short film: *My Name is Mei Shigenobu*, completed a few months before her death.
It was also in 2018 that the photography book Zones de guerre was published by Editions de l’OEil. In his essay Les Bris du temps, Elias Sanbar writes that this book “goes beyond its subject matter – the life and experiences of its author, a sort of panoramic view of a tragic period in twentieth-century history – to become a living sequence of shifting scenes.” The book highlights that Jocelyne Saab’s images constitute an indispensable record in the face of history’s violence and acts of forgetting, through a body of work that has never drawn a distinction between documentary and fiction, cinema and the visual arts, or politics and aesthetics. In this sense, the Jocelyne Saab Association has been continuing this work of preservation and transmission since 2019. It restores and distributes her films, and offers training in digital restoration, to sustain the links forged by Jocelyne Saab between images, history and cultural resistance.