THE STORY – Structured as a cinematic letter to the late Lebanese filmmaker Jocelyne Saab, Palestinian filmmaker and archivist Mohanad Yaqubi explores Saab’s daring and dynamic documentary work from 1973-1983, when she brought her trenchant insight to the complexities of Lebanon’s civil war, as well as events in Egypt, Western Sahara and Iran.
THE CAST – Mohanad Yaqubi, Jocelyne Saab
THE TEAM – Mohanad Yaqubi (Director), Mohanad Yaqubi & Mathilde Rouxel (Writers)
THE RUNNING TIME – 79 Minutes
In October 2018, renowned Lebanese filmmaker Jocelyne Saab sent an e-mail to Palestinian director Mohanad Yaqubi proposing that they join together on a collaborative project. Her e-mail ended with one sincere request: “Give me a sign of life so that we can begin.” Yaqubi, however, was slow in answering his e-mail, but, upon reading it some time later, was excited by the idea of working with Saab. By the time he was able to respond, however, he learned that Saab had since passed away. The idea of a collaboration with her never went away for the filmmaker, so he set out to give her posthumously the sign of life that she requested. His archival documentary draws from the 113 reels of 16mm film that Saab shot between 1973 and 1983 and serves as a tribute (and love letter) to her work chronicling the lives of the oppressed in Syria, Lebanon and Palestine.
Generally, I find docs that consist of clips from one director’s work can be a bit of a mixed bag. If you’re well-acquainted with the films being included, it can come off as merely a “greatest hits” kind of film without much fresh creativity. But Saab’s work was new to me, so watching her reporting in “Revolutionaries Never Die” felt fresh, particularly as she was filming in areas that were political hot spots back then and that are even more so today.
Yaqubi’s involvement with the archives actually began in January 2019, shortly after Saab’s death, when the Association Jocelyne Saab in Marseilles, knowing her admiration for Yaqubi’s work, asked him to catalog and restore her collection. He was happy with that position until April 2024, when his own family home in Gaza was destroyed during the Israeli bombing. Yaqubi then recalled a scene from Saab’s archive that saw her standing in the rubble of her own bombed-out home. Immediately saw a connection between the war that she was covering in the 1970s and ’80s and the Israel-Gaza conflict. In fact, it is that very scene that Yaqubi has selected to begin “Revolutionaries Never Die.”
Saab was a journalist first, and even in her early days, she focused on getting the story right and sharing it with the world.Yet even in the midst of conflict, she found beauty. Particularly striking is her capture of what life was like in 1974 Beirut, just before the country’s civil war broke out. Families are shown enjoying the city’s beachfront, unaware of the horrors that would befall their city, while students at the city’s Arab University intensely study in preparation for a career that they may never live to pursue. There’s a kind of visual poetry in Saab’s images that transcends mere journalism, a mark that distinguished her work throughout her entire career.
The 10 years of footage from which Yaqubi has chosen to draw his film reveals the range of countries and conflicts thatSaab managed to capture in this period. From the Palestinian Resistance to the post-Yom Kippur War in Egypt, Saab’s camera captured the aftereffects of those wars, placing a spotlight on the displaced and how the destruction has taken a toll on even the youngest of its residents. The Western Sahara War, the Iranian Revolution and the 1982 Lebanon War are all treated with the same empathetic eye, shining a spotlight on the collateral damage that these conflicts have caused.
The job of editing all 113 reels of film into a coherent, chronological narrative of Saab’s first ten years of reportage fell not only to Yaqubi but to his co-editors Elettra Bisogno and Rita Maria Habib. Theirs was a yeoman’s task but one in which Yaqubi, motivated by linking today’s conflicts with those of the past, uncovered several strikingly prescient observations in Saab’s commentary. Most relevant certainly would be commentary on the importance of the Strait of Hormuz. In her 1980 doc on the Iranian Revolution, she observed, given the dependence of both the United States and the then-Soviet Union on the high volume of oil passing through the area, that a coexistence between the two countries around the Strait of Hormuz would be a key element in maintaining world peace. Hearing Saab speak these words 46 years ago, which have proven to be so true today, provides one of the doc’s most chilling moments.
Not all of the film’s most effective scenes are tied to contemporary parallels: some touch on universal truths. I can’t shake a sequence in which Saab has filmed a group of young boys wielding homemade wooden rifles, playing at war on a Beirut beach. The mood may be cheerful, but the techniques they use to subjugate an opponent with chokeholds hint at something darker. Indeed, later in the film, Yaqubi drops in a sequence of actual war when Lebanese soldiers are fightingat close quarters that mirrors the very moves that those boys were performing on the beach. The cycle of violence in that region will live on in that region, she argues, one generation after another.
Admittedly, not all of the footage included in the film is as effective, as a weariness can sometimes creep in when witnessing all this destruction. The film covers many regions and wars, but the identifications of where we are and who is fighting can be minimal at times, blending one war into another. That may very well be the point, but the sheer volume of damaged property and lives leads to a diminishing effect over the course of the film’s 79 minutes.
Yet Yaqubi brings it all around with a return to the image that became the spark to his film — the image of Saab standing in the doorway of her bombed-out home. Only now, having seen the destruction as just another act in the continuation of the steady stream of violence that has plagued the region for centuries, can we feel the image hitting harder. That thisspark which triggered Yaqubi to share the works of this courageous filmmaker is something for which audiences will be grateful, because, in Yaqubi’s own words, “Archives are not to be preserved but to be activated.”
