A Rediscovered Legacy
Jocelyne Saab left behind a considerable archive. Beyond her films, dozens of boxes of paper archives were discovered after her death: contracts tracing the history of her films, correspondence exchanged over the years with major figures in cinema, scripts and research notes, as well as numerous film projects at various stages of development that were never realized.
These paper archives reflect an artistic practice in which writing, research, and documentation occupied a central place. They bear witness to how Jocelyne Saab conceived her films, from the first notes of intention to the final versions of scripts, including transcriptions of voice-overs and dialogues, documentary research, location photos, and correspondence with producers, broadcasters, and collaborators.
An Inventory of Unfinished Projects
Among the archives are fifteen unfinished or unrealized projects, which reveal the breadth of the artistic universe Jocelyne Saab had built around herself. These projects, spanning her entire career, include documentary films, fiction films, exhibitions, and books. There are also numerous very fragmentary projects in the digital archive contained on her hard drives, produced from the 2000s onward, which will be the subject of future processing by the Jocelyne Saab Association.
Among these unfinished projects are many that she developed on Asia, reflecting her fascination with this continent. They allow us to trace the evolution of her thinking and to grasp the directions she might have taken.
Systematic Digitization and Open Access
The entire collection of paper and photographic archives was digitized by Stéphane Moro, Esther Rouxel, and Lucie Ricardou for the Jocelyne Saab Association. This digitization work, begun in 2019, aims to make these documents accessible to researchers, artists, students, and anyone interested in Jocelyne Saab’s work.
The digitized archives are currently being processed and documented on the Base Marseille-monde, a database created in 2026 by the Jocelyne Saab Association in partnership with the Marseille-based associations Dodeskaden and Primitivi. Accessible on the Amorce platform, this database provides open access to documents and films, as well as their metadata.
The database aims to make accessible the following elements:
- Jocelyne Saab’s films and associated digitized documents (scripts, research, contracts, press reviews);
- Jocelyne Saab’s unrealized projects (texts, rushes);
- Films digitized by the Jocelyne Saab Association as part of projects carried out by partners.
These archives offer an unprecedented glimpse into the working methods of a filmmaker who traversed nearly fifty years of Middle Eastern history, and constitute an indispensable research tool for anyone interested in her work.
They have also been deposited in raw digitized form in two private institutions dedicated to cinematic archives in Lebanon: Nadi Lekol Nas and the Cinematheque Beirut project of Metropolis Cinema.