A commitment to restoring, preserving, and disseminating the audiovisual heritage of Arab countries. A platform dedicated to archival preservation of film and non-film materials in Lebanon. Work focused on digitization, restoration, and training workshops.
The association's first project was to digitize all video copies of Jocelyne Saab's films and subtitle them in Arabic, English, and French to ensure wider accessibility and better distribution. However, the poor quality of available copies quickly made it necessary to develop a film restoration plan and seek institutional alternatives to private European laboratories, whose costs were prohibitive.
This led to the realization that it was essential to develop a competent restoration chain in Lebanon. The association's objective thus became to train local technicians in the ethical principles and practices of cinematographic restoration, so that they could take charge of restoring Jocelyne Saab's films. The film copies, preserved by the French Film Archives in Bois d'Arcy, were first the subject of a systematic inventory as part of a research project conducted at the KASK art school (Ghent, Belgium) by Mathilde Rouxel and Mohanad Yaqubi in 2021. The program at KASK provided the opportunity for a first workshop dedicated to mechanical restoration and digitization, conducted in collaboration with the Institut National de l'Audiovisuel (INA) on the premises of the art school. The films were then digitized at the Polygone étoilé in Marseille, which led the AJS to organize a training course on digital restoration in partnership with FIAF and the Swiss Cinémathèque for technicians who had arrived from Beirut.
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| Left: digital restoration training workshop at the Polygone étoilé (Marseille, August 2021); right: digital restoration training workshop at ThePostOffice (Beirut, November 2021) | |
This first workshop in Marseille was preceded by an online seminar on digital film restoration in partnership with FIAF and the Swiss Cinémathèque, open to various partners working on film archives from Arab countries (Digital Archives of Algerian Cinema, Talitha, Bouanani Archives (Casablanca), Cimatheque (Cairo), Wekalet Behna (Alexandria), UMAM (Beirut), Nadi Lekol Nas (Beirut), Arab Image Foundation (Beirut), etc.) and was followed by another in-person workshop in Beirut at the post-production facility ThePostOffice, in collaboration with the Cinematheque Beirut project by Metropolis.
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| Equipment at the Swiss Cinémathèque in Penthaz. | |
A fourth workshop was organized to strengthen the skills of this team of cinema professionals who were still young restorers. Understanding the practical challenges of preserving cinematographic heritage was indeed also essential. In 2022, the association organized a four-day visit to the Swiss Cinémathèque premises in Penthaz for the ten technicians involved in the project, in order to study the various services and working methodologies specific to a reference institution. This visit allowed the team to evaluate its own work through expert feedback and to deepen its understanding of digitization challenges and the software tools used.
Thanks to this training, twelve films were restored in 2022 by a team of six image restorers, one sound restorer, and one colorist, all based in Lebanon. The necessary equipment and software — although costly — were acquired by the association to guarantee professional-level work. These restoration efforts made it possible to organize about ten retrospectives around the world in 2022 (notably in Beirut in partnership with Metropolis), as well as to publish with Les Mutins de Pangée a DVD box set bringing together the first fifteen documentaries made by Jocelyne Saab between 1974 and 1982.
Two books were also produced in collaboration with the Jocelyne Saab Association, continuing the restoration work carried out at the Polygone étoilé and KASK — respectively Le Livre pour sortir au jour de Jocelyne Saab published by éditions commune, which brings together texts and initial work on Jocelyne's paper archives along with a DVD of two Jocelyne Saab films, and Jocelyne Saab: Inventory 1973-1983 conceived by Palestinian artist Mohanad Yaqubi and published by the Sharjah Art Foundation, which reproduces the inventory of the first 16 films by Jocelyne Saab made during the Lebanese civil war.
The restoration work of the Jocelyne Saab Association on the artist's work continued until 2024. To date, the Jocelyne Saab Association has several digital restoration workstations (hardware and software), which has enabled the restoration of nearly all of Jocelyne Saab's heritage shot on film — 21 films in total, representing all the films whose copies have been found by the Association to date.
Saab's first fiction feature film, Ghazl Al-Banat (1985), was presented as a world premiere in its restored version at the prestigious Il Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna, Italy, in June 2025.
With several years of experience in film restoration, the Jocelyne Saab Association has developed solid expertise in this field, enabling it to offer an alternative approach to the traditional circuit and to operate independently and uniquely in Lebanon.
Another objective of the association was to turn these digital restoration professionals in Beirut into trainers themselves. The important thing was to be able to welcome participants from all Arab countries or the diaspora, in order to raise awareness about the lack of knowledge and the importance of the region's cinematographic heritage, often forgotten or even endangered.
In May 2024, it organized a first large-scale training session in Beirut, Lebanon, in partnership with the Institut d'études scéniques, audiovisuelles et cinématographiques (IESAV) of Saint-Joseph University, the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (ALBA), and the newly established Cooperative of Cinema Professions.
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| Right: color grading training for archives at the Cooperative of Cinema Professions; left: visit to the Arab Image Foundation | |
Planned over ten days, the program included an introduction to the three main digital restoration software, but also visits to institutions involved in the conservation and promotion of heritage and archives (Nadi Lekol Nas, the Arab Image Foundation, the Abboudi poster collection), as well as an urban walk dedicated to the abandoned cinemas of Tripoli, guided by Nathalie Rosa-Bucher, which highlighted the forgotten richness of the city's cinematographic heritage.
The training was open to all — Lebanese and non-Lebanese alike — and attracted 25 participants from six countries, mostly Lebanese, but also from Tunisia, Algeria, and Syria. The trainers were professionals who had worked on the restoration of the Algerian film by Tahar Hannache Les Plongeurs du désert (1959) in collaboration with the Digital Archives of Algerian Cinema, the Lebanese film by Mohamed Salman Une Bédouine à Paris (1964) in collaboration with Nadi Lekol Nas, and Jocelyne Saab's documentary short films. Following this workshop, the Association organized for one of the participants, who held an amateur Super8 and 16mm collection, a digitization training on the Polygone étoilé scanner in Marseille, enabling him not only to be trained in mechanical restoration and digitization, but also to digitally preserve his entire collection of several hundred reels.
In September 2024, a similar workshop was organized at the Wekalet Behna in Alexandria, Egypt. The workshop welcomed participants mainly from Egypt and Sudan and allowed work on Jocelyne Saab's films again, but also on a documentary short film by Atteyat Al-Abnoudi, preserved in the collections of the Braquage association in France.
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| Right and left: introductory presentation of the training program at Wekalet Behna (September 2024). | |
In July 2025, the association continued its training at the public university of Manouba and at the TACIR Lab in Tunis. The training also lasted ten days and included a visit to the SATPEC premises, a major production body in the early days of the film industry in independent Tunisia, and the National Archives — spaces generally closed to the public, which hold important film collections. The workshop welcomed participants mainly from Tunisia, but also from Iraq, Sudan, Algeria, Lebanon, and Egypt. It enabled work on a short film collectively produced in Algeria on the occasion of the Pan-African Festival of Algiers in 1969.
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| Digital restoration training in Tunis (July 2025). | |
This was also the first action of the newly emerging Archive Circulation Initiative network, co-founded by the Jocelyne Saab Association, the Digital Archives of Algerian Cinema, and the Tunisian production company MUJA Films.
This initiative aimed to structure the long-established partnerships with other organizations promoting the film heritage of Arab countries, and today seeks to expand its network to other archives, as well as researchers and festivals, in order to enable not only the re-emergence of images essential to our present and the construction of a history of Arab cinema, but also to allow a real distribution and circulation of these restored films, sometimes considered minor despite their historical importance.
More recently, two festivals commissioned the AJS to run digital restoration training workshops: the prestigious Cairo International Film Festival, where Walidi Ana Fakhour Bik, the first short film by Lebanese filmmaker Georges Nasser, was partially restored (in collaboration with Cinémathèque Beirut and Katsakh), and the Sharjah Film Platform, where the making-of of Jocelyne Saab's film Ghazl Al Banat was restored. The idea of continuing this collaboration using archives proposed by the festivals themselves, in order to participate in the digital preservation of their collections, is under discussion.
The objective of the Jocelyne Saab Association has been from the very beginning to find partners in Lebanon who could envision acquiring a scanner and the software necessary to continue digital restoration activities in Lebanon, capable of extending its services to the entire region.
Over the years, the Jocelyne Saab Association has worked with numerous partners (post-production companies such as Lucid Post and The Post Office, universities such as Saint-Joseph University and the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts, cinema associations such as Metropolis, Nadi Lekol Nas, UMAM, and the Cooperative of Cinema Professions), which have had to face the violence of the economic crisis weakening the country since 2019, the port explosion in 2020, and the war on its territory since 2023. This difficult situation has hindered many projects, led many professionals to leave the country, and several initiatives have transformed their objectives.
Facing the need to further structure its activities, the Jocelyne Saab Association participated in 2025 in the creation of a non-profit civil society organization. Maraya ("mirror" in Arabic) is a structure based in Lebanon, to which the Jocelyne Saab Association has delegated all its equipment: 6 workstations fully equipped for digital restoration work; the permanent license + educational license for Diamant HS-ART acquired in 2021; licenses for Da Vinci Resolve Studio, ProTools, iZotope RX11 software acquired in 2022; a 16mm rewinder and small equipment for mechanical restoration; storage (hard drives); as well as access to the DIAZ database acquired in 2025 in partnership with the Dodeskaden association in Marseille, to document as much as possible each film that has passed through the association's hands and to provide the widest possible access to the metadata of each element. This equipment currently enables the team of technicians to organize training workshops and digital restoration services, which are generally accompanied by indexing and a short research project.
The acquisition of a scanner in Lebanon will allow Maraya to complete the work chain that the Jocelyne Saab Association has been trying to develop since 2021: it will be able to put its expertise at the service of film archives preserved by institutions and associations in Lebanon and beyond. Access to a scanner in Beirut would not only facilitate work between partners already networked, but would also allow many more films to re-emerge, be restored, and put back into circulation.
The two volunteer partners leading the Maraya civil society organization in Beirut are Nadim Kamel, Karl Salamé, and Jinane Mrad. They are accompanied by the entire team of the Jocelyne Saab Association.