*A guided tour of the exhibition and conversation with curator Mathilde Rouxel will be held on Tuesday May 27, at 5 pm.
Saab’s obsession with gardens reappears time and again in her work: for her, they are a symbol of childhood, a naivety spoiled and lost by the war, the traces of which she has been searching for ever since.
This exhibition explores Jocelyne Saab’s working methods by delving into her paper archives, right up to her most recent video works. The impressive evolution of Jocelyne Saab’s prolific work demonstrates her ability to use different media to express her ideas in a world in perpetual upheaval. By immersing ourselves in a career spanning almost fifty years, the work of a pioneer of Arab cinema is revealed, crossing issues addressed with strong commitment, from her opposition to war to her defense of women’s right to control their own bodies, from her critique of the relationship between East and West to her relationship with Asia.
Exhibition curated by Mathilde Rouxel, assisted by Michael Issa El Helou.
Archive digitization : Stéphane Moro for the Jocelyne Saab Association.
IMAGINARY POSTCARDS
Jocelyne Saab, Lebanon/Turkey, 2016, video, 7′
An imaginary post card written to the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk. Jocelyne Saab writes about her illness, about the fragility of her body, and the situation in the Middle East that is ravaged by war.
ONE DOLLAR A DAY / UN DOLLAR PAR JOUR
Jocelyne Saab, Lebanon/France, 2016, video, 7′
Jocelyne Saab tries to fight by all means, modest or monumental, the indifference regarding the misery in Syrian refugee camps in Lebanon where people are victims of economic and military interests, as epitomized by the advertising canvases they use to build their bitter refuge.
CAFÉ DU GENRE
Jocelyne Saab, France, 2013, 27′
Six 4-minute short films each filmed in the countries of the Mediterranean, and dealing with expressions of gender, the body, sexuality and identity.
MY NAME IS MEI SHIGENOBU
Jocelyne Saab, Lebanon, 2018, 8′
A delicate portrait of Mei Shigenobu, daughter of the founder of the Japanese Red Army in Beirut, Fusako Shigenobu.
Jocelyne Saab (1948-2019) was a French-Lebanese filmmaker and artist. As a war reporter, documentary filmmaker, fiction filmmaker, photographer and video artist, throughout her life she developed her language and mediums of expression to denounce injustice and work for a better society. She is best known for her support for the Palestinians and for her documentary work during the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990), but also for her fiction film Dunia, shot in Egypt against the rise of fundamentalism in the country. Her films reflect the great social and anti-colonial struggles of the 20th century: that of the Polisario Front in the Western Sahara, that of Iran after the 1979 revolution, that of the Egyptians with the bread riots of 1977 and the rise of fundamentalism in the 1980s. The Lady of Saigon is a portrait of a woman who recounts the maquis and the Vietnamese communists’ struggle against the Americans.
Mathilde Rouxel, PhD in film studies from the New Sorbonne University, wrote her thesis on the figures of the people in struggle in Arab women’s cinema (1967-2020). She has published Jocelyne Saab, la mémoire indomptée (Beirut, Dar an-Nahar, 2015) and co-edited ReFocus: The Films of Jocelyne Saab (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) and Le Livre pour sortir au jour de Jocelyne Saab (Marseille, éditions commune, 2023). Associate researcher at IREMAM-CNRS (Aix-Marseille University), she is artistic director of the Aflam (Marseille) and Noisy-le-Sec Franco-Arab Film Festivals. She co-founded and direct the Association Jocelyne Saab to preserve the work of the Lebanese filmmaker.
