Mirroring the Lebanese Cultural Resistance association created by Jocelyne Saab in 2014, the Jocelyne Saab Association was created in 2019 in France following the director’s death, in order to protect, restore and promote her artistic heritage.

The vast majority of these films, shot between 1974 and 1986 in 16mm, were preserved in good condition at the Archives françaises du film, and have now been restored so that they can be widely distributed. These restorations were carried out using Jocelyne Saab’s reversal-positive work prints, which were badly damaged due to the editing work carried out directly on the material, without it having been possible to make negative or internegative copies of the rushes: these were the television techniques of the time. As a result, the images were very marked: scratched and stained, already at the time of the emergency wartime editing, and also affected later by Jocelyne’s reuse of the material for other projects. Driven by the desire to make these images known, most of them almost invisible until then, AJS undertook a major restoration project from the outset, and chose to implement it in Lebanon, where most of the images were shot during the civil war. This decision quickly became obvious, given the work of memory initiated by Jocelyne Saab during her lifetime, at a time when the country was once again sinking into a serious economic, social and political crisis. To bring this project to fruition in Lebanon, we began by raising awareness of the challenges of film preservation among the selected technicians. Thanks to the support of numerous professionals whose expertise in this field is recognized worldwide – the Institut national de l’audiovisuel, the Fédération Internationale des Archives Film (FIAF) and the Cinémathèque suisse – as well as the expertise of several Lebanese post-production companies, the JSA organized a series of workshops in Beirut with the aim of teaching the various film restoration techniques (digitization, digital image restoration, digital sound restoration) in compliance with the rules established by the FIAF ethical charter.

These workshops were mainly aimed at technicians based in Lebanon, and at technicians from our host structures in Ghent (KASK & Conservatoriuum) and Marseille (Polygone étoilé). They led to the training of a dozen Lebanese technicians, whose work enabled us to restore Jocelyne Saab’s first 15 documentaries.

Now trainers in their own right, they accompany others interested in discovering the various issues involved in film preservation during workshops organized regularly by the JSA in various Arab countries (Lebanon, Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan) (see “Our training courses”). These workshops are also an opportunity to restore films, enabling them to be put back into circulation without difficulty.