Jocelyne Saab : courts en Égypte
Known for her tireless documentary coverage of the Lebanese civil war from 1974 to 1982, Jocelyne Saab did not stop at her country's borders. Educated in pan-Arab ideology by her father, she belongs to a generation shaped by the independence struggles of the post-World War II era. While the voices of oppressed peoples continued to be heard, and the progressive pro-Palestinian struggle in Lebanon suffered setbacks in the conflict that was tearing the country apart, Saab set off to document other struggles. First, in Egypt, which she already knew well and where she set off to document the aftermath of the bread revolt of January 1977, which led Sadat's government to back down in the face of popular anger. Then to the Western Sahara, where a year earlier, members of the Polisario Front had declared independence for the Sahrawi Republic. In 1981, two years after the revolution, she went to Iran to document the evolution of the country and its mentalities. When she left Lebanon in the 1980s, it was back to Egypt to film society and its transformation, in a series of films for French television.
The cycle Jocelyne Saab, hors frontières offers us this international circulation in the Maghreb and Middle East region that fascinated the filmmaker and shaped her political ideals.
Guest programmer: Mathilde Rouxel
Jocelyne Saab travels to Egypt to capture a snapshot of Cairo, the "mother of the world", as she searches for its roots. As Beirut, her city, falls into ruins, she goes to the City of the Dead to find traces of a way of life and traditions that are also disappearing under the blows of globalization.
Alexandria, a Hellenistic, Greek, Roman and Coptic city, was also a little Paris in the 1930s. Together with the poet Cavaffi and the writer Lawrence Durell, Jocelyne Saab evokes this city when it was at the heart of the Arab and European worlds.
Humiliated by the 1967 defeat, the Egyptian people look for ways to rebuild their sense of identity. Religion seems to point the way for them: Jocelyne Saab portrays the success of the Muslim Brotherhood and the increasingly rigid cultural values taking over Cairo at the end of the 1980s.
Jocelyne Saab
Jocelyne Saab is a Franco-Lebanese director, photographer and visual artist. She was one of the most important filmmakers of the new Lebanese cinema. As a freelance journalist for European, North American and Japanese TV channels, she made numerous documentary films on the Lebanese war, the Iraq war, Kurdistan, Iran, Syria, the Golan Heights, the Western Sahara, the consequences of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Asia, particularly Vietnam. In less than thirty years, Jocelyne Saab has directed a total of thirty documentaries, as well as fiction films and a vast photography series. One of her fiction films, Dunia, caused a scandal when it was shown at the Cairo Film Festival in 2005, and was censored when it was released in Egyptian cinemas.
Parallel to her work as a filmmaker, Jocelyne Saab began photographing. In 2008, she published her book Zones de guerres, a collection of her photographs documenting five decades of conflict in the Third World and the Middle East. She exhibited another series of one hundred photographs entitled Sense, Icons and Sensitivity in several countries. In 2016, she produced a final photographic series and two art videos entitled One Dollar a Day.
