Jocelyne Saab was born in 1948 in Lebanon and grew up in a Maronite family in West Beirut. She developed an early interest in cinema, but was encouraged to pursue economics studies, which led her into journalism. She first wrote for Al Safa under the supervision of Etel Adnan and, in the early 1970s, hosted a radio program on Lebanese airwaves titled Les Marsupilamis ont les yeux bleus (“Marsupilamis Have Blue Eyes”). It was at the radio station that she learned the basics of editing. While studying in Paris for her fourth year, she was hired by the French national TV to be sent as a translator to Libya for a portrait of Gaddafi in 1973. The journalist she was supposed to travel with did not obtain his visa, so she ended up directing the report herself—which earned her a place on the editorial staff.
Biography
She was subsequently sent to cover the October War of 1973 from Egypt and Syria, to Iraq to cover the war against the Kurds, and to Syria to report on the Palestinian struggle. In late 1973, together with Arnaud Hamelin, she made Les Palestiniens continuent (“The Palestinians Continue”), and decided to use some footage shot during that assignment to produce a report on the resistance of Palestinian women in Lebanon. Her film Les Femmes palestiniennes (“Palestinian Women”) was rejected in 1974 by the ORTF editorial board and forgotten. At that point, Jocelyne Saab decided to turn down the position of special correspondent in the Middle East that was offered to her and instead make her own films. After her film on Palestinian suicide commandos, considered a scoop (Le Front du Refus, “The Rejection Front,” 1975), she shot Le Liban dans la tourmente (“Lebanon in Turmoil,” 1975) with Jorg Stöcklin, about the early days of the civil war that would devastate Lebanon for fifteen years. Gradually, she moved away from the conventions of television, and while continuing her meticulous information-gathering work, she introduced freer and more poetic editing forms in her films, and invited poets to contribute some of the commentaries. This is particularly true of her Beirut trilogy: Beyrouth, jamais plus (“Beirut, Never Again,” 1976) and Lettre de Beyrouth (“Letter from Beirut,” 1978) were made with the participation of Etel Adnan, and Beyrouth, ma ville (“Beirut, My City,” 1982) with playwright Roger Assaf.
After two years of war in Lebanon, Jocelyne Saab decided to leave again to cover other struggles in the region. She arrived in Egypt after the 1977 bread riots and made Egypte, la cité des morts (or Chaque année en janvier, “Egypt, the City of the Dead”—or “Every Year in January”) on the living conditions of the Egyptian people following Sadat’s liberal infitah policies. The film earned her a seven-year ban from the country. That same year, she went to the Western Sahara to understand the struggle of the Polisario Front against Morocco and Mauritania in Le Sahara n’est pas à vendre (“The Sahara Is Not for Sale”). This film also earned her a lifetime ban from Morocco. Following these documentaries, which were released together in cinemas in Paris in 1978 and affirmed her internationalist stance, she returned to Lebanon to continue covering the Palestinian struggle, the daily resistance of Lebanese civilians, and to develop her first fiction film. She assisted Algerian director Farouk Beloufa on the set of his film Nahla, for which she made the making-of documentary Sur le tournage de Nahla (“On the Set of Nahla,” 1979)—her first experience on a fiction shoot—which she continued with a role as third assistant director on Volker Schlöndorff’s The Circle of Deceit (1981).
In 1980, together with Rafic Boustani, she went to Iran to cover the aftermath of the 1979 revolution, which she captured in all its complexity in a seminal documentary, Iran, L’Utopie en marche (“Iran, Utopia in Motion”), shot just before the start of the Gulf War. After a foray into fiction and a return to Egypt for a documentary series documenting the evolution of Egyptian society in the late 1980s (the series Egypte… Egypte ? [“Egypt… Egypt?”], 1986; Les Almées, danseuses orientales [“The Almehs, Oriental Dancers”], 1989). In 1997, she traveled to Vietnam to follow a former guerrilla fighter turned communist minister, Dr. Hoa, whose portrait she made in La Dame de Saigon (“The Lady of Saigon”), fulfilling her desire to film Vietnam—a country whose liberation she would have covered in 1975 had war not broken out in Lebanon.
In less than thirty years, Jocelyne Saab made a total of thirty documentaries, which were broadcast on international television channels, circulated widely, and won awards at European and international festivals. In 1985, in the midst of the Lebanese war, she shot her first feature fiction film, The Razor’s Edge, starring two French stars (Jacques Weber and Juliet Berto) alongside a cast of non-professional Lebanese actors. The film was selected for the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes in 1985, and was later re-edited and released in French cinemas in 1988 under the title Une vie suspendue (“A Suspended Life”).
In 1994, she dedicated a docu-fiction, Il était une fois Beyrouth : histoire d’une star (“Once Upon a Time in Beirut: Story of a Star”), composed largely of archival images and outtakes from her earlier films on Beirut, to the centenary of cinema. This film project also provided an opportunity to gather a large number of film archives for a planned Lebanese Cinematheque, to be rebuilt after the war, which Jocelyne Saab patiently assembled as a form of memory to give back to her traumatized people under the project title “Beirut, 1001 Images.” Although the cinematheque project did not materialize at the time, the restored heritage was presented worldwide in a screening series launched in 1993. She was awarded the Order of Chevalier of Arts and Letters by France for this work, which was supported by both the Lebanese Ministry of Culture and the French Ministry of Culture.
In 2005, she shot Dunia, employing stars of the Egyptian cultural industry: iconic actress Hanan Turk in the lead role, alongside popular singer Mohamad Mounir and the founder of the Cairo Opera Ballet Company, Lebanese dancer and former student of Maurice Béjart, Walid Aouni. Fascinated by Egypt, Jocelyne Saab ventured into making a film in the Egyptian style, whose influence had already appeared in her earlier fictions. Condemning female genital mutilation and the rise of fundamentalism, she encountered a radical rejection of the film in most Arab countries. However, the film was awarded prizes at numerous international festivals, and was notably in competition for the feature film award at the Sundance Festival in the United States.
Following this difficult rejection, Jocelyne Saab turned to photography in 2007, denouncing the gaze on women in Arab countries through a series of staged Barbie photographs entitled Le Revers de l’Orientalisme (“The Reverse of Orientalism”), as well as a series of photographs of Bedouin tents with sensually evocative titles, shot in Libya, entitled Architecture molle (“Soft Architecture”).
In 2009, she completed a new feature film, What’s Going On?, shot in her native city. It questions the possibility of Beirut’s rebirth, and more broadly the creative process in all its depth.
In 2013, Jocelyne Saab made for MuCEM in Marseille, on the occasion of the exhibition “Au Bazar du Genre” (“At the Gender Bazaar”), six films on the theme of sex and gender in six cities of the Eastern Mediterranean, brought together under the title Café du Genre (“Gender Café”).
In 2013, she founded the Cultural Resistance International Film Festival, of which she was artistic director. There she presented films from Asia and the Mediterranean that, through their own histories, engage with the history and situation of Beirut in its contemporary context—a cinema that heals the country’s wounds and invites reflection on the possibility of peace and intercommunal respect. The festival extended across the entire Lebanese territory. In 2018, she also presented the first edition of the Lebanese Biennial of Contemporary Art at MACAM.
At the end of her life, she produced a final series of photographs, One Dollar a Day, devoted to the situation of Syrian refugees in Lebanon, along with several art videos: in 2016, One Dollar a Day and Imaginary Postcard, shot in Turkey, and My Name is Mei Shigenobu, released posthumously in 2019. The opening of the One Dollar a Day exhibition at the Institut Français de Beyrouth in 2016 was the occasion for her decoration as an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters, honoring her entire career.
The last work undertaken by Jocelyne Saab synthesizes a life of work in service of peoples and against injustice: Zones de guerre (“War Zones”), a book of images drawn from her films as well as from her photographic collections, both exhibited and unpublished, stands as the final testimony Jocelyne Saab offered before succumbing to illness on January 7, 2019.
She left behind numerous unfinished projects, preserved in traces of written or visual research.
Following her death, the Jocelyne Saab Association was created to carry forward her cinematic legacy and her ideal of accessibility to history and to works as resources for everyone. Today, her entire body of work is available for screening in multiple languages, and her paper archives have been digitized and are open to all.