The Razor's Edge

Set amid the Lebanese Civil War, Saab’s fiction feature debut centers the unlikely bond formed between Karim, a forty-something painter, and Samar, a teenager who grew up in war-torn Beirut.                   

“A striking meditation on humanity’s struggle in the face of unthinkable horror.” – New York Film Festival

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]).