The Beirut Trilogy

Lyrical and uncompromising, the films of Jocelyne Saab (1948-2019) are at once landmark works of Lebanese cinema and masterpieces of the essay film form. The poetic voiceovers of her movies recall Chris Marker, and her fragmented, diaristic images are reminiscent of Jonas Mekas. But Saab’s poetic vision, and her intimate interactions with the displaced, the exiled, and the voiceless, mark her films as uniquely her own. Trained as a radio and television journalist, Saab turned her attention to nonfiction films in the wake of the Lebanese Civil War. Her epic, impressionistic trilogy of documentaries about Beirut that followed captures a city at once wounded, mournful, and bristling with life and energy, chronicling a moment at which “a kind of bitter poetry has replaced the carelessness of the past.”       

Beirut, Never Again (1976)

Lebanese writer and painter Etel Adnan provides poetic voiceover for what would become the first of Saab’s “Beirut Trilogy,” in which the filmmaker follows the daily destruction of the city. Every morning between 6 and 10am, she roams around Beirut while the militias from both sides rest from their night of fighting.

Letter from Beirut (1978)

Three years after the beginning of the Civil War the filmmaker returns to her city which has irrevocably changed. An epistolary film in which Saab wanders the streets, rides the bus, chats with refugees and reflects on the war’s toll.

Beirut My City (1982)

In July 1982 the Israeli army laid siege to Beirut. Four years earlier Jocelyne Saab saw her 150-year-old childhood home go up in flames. She asked herself: when did all this begin? Every place becomes a historical site and every name a memory. Considered by Saab herself to be her most important film.

The filmmaker Jocelyne Saab (1948-2019) was born in Lebanon and trained as a war reporter for French television, becoming one of the few women producing politically-committed documentaries across the Middle East and North Africa. This retrospective traces the distinct filmmaking periods in her long and contradictory career.

     
In Saab’s early documentary work, she chronicled the Polisario Front in the Western Sahara’s struggle against Moroccan annexation (THE SAHARA IS NOT FOR SALE [1977]); the impoverishment of the people of Cairo by President Anwar Sadat’s infitah policies of economic liberalization and accelerated private investment (EGYPT, CITY OF THE DEAD [1977]); and the Palestinian resistance struggle in Lebanon (PALESTINIAN WOMEN [1974] and REJECTION FRONT [1975]).