The Association

The Jocelyne Saab Association was created in 2019 with the mission of making Jocelyne Saab's cinematic heritage accessible to the Lebanese public.

In order to remedy the lack of knowledge about the artist's work at the time of her death and to enable the restoration work of these images, essential to Lebanese heritage, to be carried out directly in Lebanon, the Jocelyne Saab Association began organizing digital restoration training workshops, in partnership with the International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) and the Swiss Cinematheque. A first team of about ten people worked on the restoration of 21 films by Jocelyne Saab, and today train other technicians through workshops organized in Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, and Sharjah.

Alongside these technical training workshops, the Jocelyne Saab Association supports programming and creation projects, offering analog editing creative workshops and digitization-creation residencies from film archives.

In 2025, the Association participated in the creation of Maraya, a non-profit civil society organization registered in Lebanon, to which it entrusted all the equipment acquired over the years and which works with the technicians of the team constituted until then. Maraya's mission is to host film preservation projects, restore films, conduct research on their history and facilitate their circulation, as well as to offer its services and expertise to archives and partner initiatives.

This site proposes to browse the activities of the Jocelyne Saab Association.

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Jocelyne Saab

Jocelyne Saab (1948-2019) was a war reporter, documentary filmmaker, fiction filmmaker and experimental artist. After working as a correspondent for French television in Libya, Egypt, Syria and Iraq, she covered the Lebanese civil war, as well as the armed struggle in Western Sahara and the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution. She also worked for many years in Egypt, from which she was banned for seven years because of her political documentary work, and following her first two fiction feature films shot in Lebanon, Ghazl Al-Banat (1985) and Once Upon a Time in Beirut (1994), she shot Dunia (2006) in Cairo. She later turned to photography, installation art and video art, and is considered a major figure in Lebanese cinema.

Her posthumous work also includes many unrealized projects, which remain in written form or in the form of a few filmed rushes, which have been archived by the Jocelyne Saab Association and are available on request.

Since its creation in 2019, the Jocelyne Saab Association has worked on the digitization and restoration of Jocelyne Saab's films, the digitization of the filmmaker's paper archives, as well as support for programming and creation from Jocelyne Saab's works. This site offers both a presentation of the filmmaker's works, VOD access to the film, digital access to paper archives and a list of resources to consult to study the work and figure of Jocelyne Saab.

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