Restoring and Curating Jocelyne Saab's Cinema of Middle East Struggle

In: Feminist media histories, Band 10, Heft 2-3, S. 215-226

Abstract

Jocelyne Saab was one of the most prolific Lebanese directors of her generation. Yet for a long time, her work went unnoticed by Lebanese and international critics alike. Difficult to program due to the quality of the copies in circulation, some of her work on the Lebanese civil war and the great popular struggles of the 1970s–1980s in the SWANA region fell into oblivion. Created in 2019 to promote and enhance the filmmaker's work, the Association Jocelyne Saab has undertaken to train technicians in Lebanon in the specialized field of film preservation and digital restoration. This undertaking, supported by FIAF, the Swiss Film Archive, and INA, who supervised the training courses organized by the Jocelyne Saab Association, enabled the restoration of fifteen documentary films made between 1974 and 1982. This allowed a feminist look at the history of the SWANA region to be put back into circulation.