The Cinematheque

New Restorations

“[Saab’s films] form the panels of one of the most remarkable frescoes in the history of cinema, not simply regarding Lebanon but as far as all relationships between an artist and a nation are concerned.”

Nicole Brenez, Sabzian

Jocelyne Saab, a Lebanese journalist and foreign war correspondent, turned to filmmaking in the mid-1970s to document the erupting armed conflict laying waste to her country and people. Her ​“Beirut Trilogy” is an extraordinary portrait of life during wartime, set in the ruins of Saab’s no-longer-recognizable birthplace, in which the prospect of death—for yourself, for others—becomes numbingly commonplace. Each film adopts a different approach, a different vantage, to measure the human toll of escalating violence. Beirut, Never Again (1976), a narrated ghost story, laments a once-cosmopolitan city now vanished under rubble. Letter from Beirut (1978), a travelogue by bus, traverses a bombed-out landscape carved up along religious and occupied lines. Beirut, My City (1982), a city symphony, sets music and the voiceover of Lebanese playwright Roger Assaf to a montage of news footage and Saab’s 16mm testimony to survival.

Advisory: The Beirut Trilogy contains unsimulated images of war and death.

Beirut, Never Again
(Beyrouth, jamais plus)
France/​Lebanon 1976
Jocelyne Saab
35 min. DCP In French and Arabic with English subtitles

Letter from Beirut
(Lettre de Beyrouth)
France/​Lebanon 1978
Jocelyne Saab
52 min. DCP In French and Arabic with English subtitles

Beirut, My City
(Beyrouth, ma ville)
France/​Lebanon 1982
Jocelyne Saab
37 min. DCP In French and Arabic with English subtitles

“Her magnum opus … What moves me in Saab’s films, amid the violence she courageously records, is the room she finds for beauty.”

Jonathan Mackris, Screen Slate