Le Bateau de l’exil (1982)

Jocelyne Saab (Lebanon/France) was an artist, photographer, filmmaker, and journalist born in Beirut in 1948. Considered a pioneer of Lebanese cinema, she focused her filmmaking practice on the disadvantaged—from displaced people to exiled fighters, cities at war, and a Fourth World without a voice. She studied at Saint-Joseph University (Beirut) and received a BSc (Econ) from Sorbonne University. She made more than 50 feature-length and short films, as well as multimedia installations, that were exhibited extensively at festivals and museums around the world including Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, Cairo Film Festival, National Museum of Singapore, Sundance Film Festival, Art Fair Dubai, and DocLisboa. She is the recipient of many awards and honours, including an Arab Critics Prize, a jury prize from International Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, and a Province of Milan Award from Milan Film Festival. In 1992, Saab began a multiyear commitment to reconstitute the Lebanese Cinematheque, eventually organizing a cycle of screenings entitled Beirut, a Thousand and One Images at Institut du Monde Arabe (1993), presenting more than 200 films. She was decorated with a Chevalier de L’ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1995) from the French Republic for this immense archival achievement. In 2013, she founded the International Cultural Resistance Film Festival in Lebanon, of which she was artistic director, and taught at Institute of Cinematographic and Audiovisual Studies in Beirut. Association Jocelyne Saab was founded in 2019 to restore and promote the artist’s work. She died in Paris in 2019. Her absence remains deeply felt.