It feels fitting that the first word the pioneering Lebanese director Jocelyne Saab speaks in the voice over of Palestinian Women (1974)—the first film she made for French television—is non. This refusal feels important: one could take it as a rejection of the dominant Western narrative around Palestine. It captures the essence of Saab's filmography, too. Today her films, which are at once politically engaged and poetic, have become unique historical documents. Palestinian Women has the hallmarks of an early film, from its straight-to-camera interview style to its illustrative editing. But it is significant in as much as it anchors Saab's political commitment to the Palestinian cause, and as an attempt to understand the multi-faceted reality of her native Lebanon. It was never broadcast in her lifetime: the French TV channel Antenne 2 commissioned it, then rejected and banned it for being “too political”.[i]

 

Saab was refreshingly clear-eyed about her own positionality and the access it afforded her. She had a privileged Christian upbringing, but she was, perhaps unusually, committed to class struggle and to the political agency of people from all walks of life. In 1994, Saab reflected, “We didn’t have contact with our origins. We were the generation that started looking at our roots, looking to see why we lost them. I could have found this by studying Arabic literature at the university in Cairo, for example. But as a girl in a bourgeois family, they preferred to send me to Paris than to Egypt to study.”[ii] Class is a central concern in much of Saab’s work. In Palestinian Women, she highlights the insidious forms of prejudice Palestinians face as refugees in Lebanon: even university-educated women expect lower wages than their Lebanese counterparts, often leading them to take work in the Gulf.

 

A brief history lesson frames Palestinian Women. 1948 and the Nakba are invoked through UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) footage itself taken from Samir Hissen's 1967 film Aftermath, which was made during the 1967 Naksa (the “setback” or “Six Day War” as it’s best known outside of Palestine).[iii] Through her narration, Saab highlights the many facets of the women’s struggle, appealing to an internationalist feminism. When filming militant women, she shows their living quarters and conditions alongside the training and activities more commonly associated with their political drive. By opening the film in a nursery, Saab underlines that militancy takes many forms and that the Palestinian resistance is a movement looking towards life, looking towards a future for the children pictured in frame.

 

In The Rejection Front (1975), Saab films a group of young suicide commandos, fresh-faced 16 to 20-year-olds who are prepared to give their lives for the cause. She was the first journalist to be given access to their secret underground training camp, and filmed there alone because her cinematographer, Hassan Naamani, felt it too dangerous. Although she notes receiving "reprimands and criticism from the more moderate division of Fatah and the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization],”[iv] who feared that the depiction of a radical fringe group would perpetuate a negative image of the Palestinian struggle, The Rejection Front is, in many ways, consistent with Saab's approach of looking at a question from as many angles as possible.[v] In its imagery, framing and range of shots, the film is in aesthetic dialogue with the films being made by the Palestine Cinema Unit at this time, and is imbued with Saab's inquisitive, humanist gaze, most palpable in a joyous dance scene in which the commandos sing as one young fighter dances, a scarf tied around his hips. "His moves are very feminine, I think. Let’s not forget that dancing accompanies all the important acts of life,"[vi] Saab later said in a conversation with Olivier Hadouchi.[vii]

 

The representation of militant struggle was a popular thematic of the 1970s. The late 60s saw the establishment of the Palestine Film Unit (PFU), a film collective operating largely out of Lebanon and Jordan as part of the Fatah movement within the PLO. Founded by filmmakers including Mustafa Abu Ali, Hani Jawhariyyeh, and Salafa Mersal, the PFU's aim was to develop a militant Palestinian cinema, documenting with political purpose, inspired by similar anti-imperial struggles in Algeria, Cuba, and Vietnam.“Militant cinema is a monument to creative self-determination,” writes poet Momtaza Mehri, in relation to the films of French-Lebanese filmmaker Heiny Srour. The recent restoration of her seminal Leila and the Wolves (1984) has screened across the world.[viii] Reflecting the renewed interest in the histories and legacies of militant cinema, Mehri writes, “such films become lodestars for a generation reckoning with contemporary political and social upheavals. The 20th century looms over the shoulder, resonant in its promises and betrayals.” The duration folded into Mehri’s words is poignant: the “looming” 20th century looks ahead to events as yet unknown to the filmmakers, and yet is in the past, 'over the shoulder' as it were, for viewers beholding their work today. Saab’s early films were all made quickly, with tiny teams working with the materiality of 16mm and the physicality of a camera. Far more than mere reflections of the past,  these missives speak with prescience and urgency to our current realities because they are in such deep conversation with their present.

 

Limbo permeates Ship of Exile (1982), a film Saab was particularly proud of. It documents the PLO leader Yasser Arafat taking a 44-hour journey on the “Atlantis” from Beirut to Piraeus in Greece, and the PLO's definitive departure from Beirut. The film marks the end of an era and represents a loaded question mark around the future of the Palestinian liberation movement. By 1982, Saab too was living in exile in Paris. As documented in Beyrouth, Ma Ville (1982), her home in Beirut had been destroyed by Israeli bombs. She was at this point a household name in France because of her TV reporting, and, due to her popularity, she was given extra slots for live discussion. In these, she was able to extend her inquisitive, conversational reportage style to speaking with an audience. Saab had been invited to film Arafat’s momentous departure—or, more accurately, expulsion—by the man himself,[ix] and was the only filmmaker on board the Atlantis.[x] She was conscious of the responsibility  of representing the revolutionary leader to the French public, and of the historical weight of her documentation.[xi] Saab frames Arafat (or “Abu Ammar” as he was affectionately known) next to children, subtly conveying a gentle benevolent image of the charismatic leader. Though it is a dignified portrait, Saab’s voice over confirms the oddity of the situation (“a strange cruise ship”), while her questions to the select few traveling on the ship (“60 silent men”) punctuate the lull of the water. Suspended in time, in the middle of the sea, there is a sense of curtailed possibility as distance from Palestine increases. Ship of Exile marks the end of Saab’s reportage work in her native Lebanon. "When I shot these images, I really felt like I was living a historical moment. I didn’t want to leave the city, and I hesitated before getting on the boat. Besides, did those who provided the boat taking Arafat and his troops deliberately choose a boat named “Atlantis”? [...] This film is part of the history of the Palestinians. I gave them a copy. It’s dedicated to them."

 

Where too much had been lost, Saab turned to filming other parts of the Arab region, to the imaginary possibilities of narrative fiction, to short experimental films. Her contemporary, the Lebanese-born Cairo-based filmmaker Arab Loutfi, had a different impulse: to salvage something from devastation. Loutfi, who grew up in a secular Muslim, leftist family, describes her first feature-length film The Upper Gate (1991) as “a form of self-therapy.” She explained, “after the Israeli invasion in 1981 I had this obsession that someone was trying to destroy our memory. So I became obsessed with the idea of not losing our memory. I was afraid of losing myself in this chaos, and the idea of making a film developed out of these fears. In fact, many of my friends were killed, and many places and documents were destroyed.”

 

In The Upper Gate, vignettes carry us across shared memories of the Lebanese city of Saida​​—a bustling, breathing city folds over the ghost of the city that once was. Fishermen talk of the cooperative they formed to push back against a large company attempting to monopolise fishing along the coast. Teenage siblings reflect on the mottled pride and pain of losing their father to the cause: “It’s painful to know a father through others,” one of them quietly admits. A mother tells of her son, Nicholas, a Christian who was active in the resistance movement, and his love story with Ilham, a Palestinian woman. In a tableau that recalls a large-scale impressionist painting in its stillness and dappled light, Nicholas’s mother stares straight to camera. Dignified under the gaze of her martyred son’s portrait, grief quietly emanates from her small body and fills the large, empty room.

 

Loutfi is a gleaner: “In my film I wanted to collect memory, to catch moments that I really relate to. And not only with cinema: I did a lot of writing during this time. I am a passionate collector anyway; I love to collect all kinds of things, even old shoes. I have shoes that I have carried around with me for years because they remind me of a certain time in my life that I loved.[xii]” In Loutfi’s shoe collection, I hear an echo of Palestinian teacher Michelline Awad, who was photographed by Alfred Yaghobzadeh in 1988, clutching her yellow heels in one hand while throwing stones at an Israeli tank with the other. She had just left mass and the tank’s load of soldiers had been harassing a group of children. She later described her act as “an uprising from the heart.”[xiii]

 

Loutfi’s forms of uprising include archiving her city, collecting its voices. Stone by stone, she builds a bridge from the violence of erasure to tangible, recorded memory. A father is interviewed about his imprisonment by the Israelis, while his young child’s interest in the camera ebbs and flows. Intent fascination gives way to a yawn, although, as viewers, we can imagine that one day this child will hold these frames close and dear. His father recounts telling the Israeli prison guards that it was an honour to enter Palestine, "the land of my ancestors.”(He knew the guards, meanwhile, came from “four corners of Europe.”) Elsewhere, a man with an amputated leg hops out of the lush blue sea after a swim; he explains that he lost his leg in 1988 when the Israelis firebombed the harbour. But his disability hasn’t impeded his work as a carpenter or as a diver. What he notes, instead, is another kind of fissure: “Before the invasion, I didn’t know who was Shiite, Druze, Christian, Maronite. The Israelis divided us.”

 

Loutfi’s hometown, Saida, was in the region where many Palestinians fled after the Nakba. “I grew up,” she says, “in a neighbourhood where politics was a part of daily life; in fact it was daily life. I was thirteen in 1967, when the Six Day War with Israel broke out and Che Guevara died. This was the atmosphere I grew up in. Everything was related to society; I didn’t have time to think of myself as an individual. I was more concerned with what I wanted my community to be."[xiv] The voices gathered in Loutfi's films are testament to this understanding of self in relation to community, and her later films all quietly but powerfully build on the radical potential of testimonial. Tell Your Tale, Little Bird (2007) listens to the stories of seven Palestinian women, including Leila Khaled, who took part in the airplane hijackings planned by the PFLP [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine] during the 1970s. Over Their Dead Bodies: Tantoura, the Forgotten Massacre (2008) portrays the Palestinian survivors of the May 1948 Zionist massacre of Tantoura through a series of interviews. Using her camera to piece together voices and narratives that work against the erasure compounded by Zionist violence and media bias, Loutfi's work as a documentarian is underpinned by understandings born on the streets of Saida. Loutfi notes, "I was an observer of the changes happening around me, and at the same time I was a part of the changes I was observing.”[xv]

 

This quartet of films by Saab and Loutfi encompass the tumultuous decades of the Lebanese Civil War. Viewing their images from the vantage point of ongoing genocide in Gaza (two years at the time of writing, with violence expanded into the West Bank, into the South of Lebanon as well as in Beirut, Syria and beyond), it is confronting to see the foundations of the settler-colonial Zionist project, and to see anew its irrefutable long-standing violence.

 

That these works can be in such rich dialogue with the present is itself testament to the place of conversation might hold as a mode of engaging with the world and history. There is dialogue both within the frame, and in the discussions that these films bring about. Speaking to this approach to filmmaking, John Akomfrah has said that “with conversation as a method, one can retrieve things.”[xvi] "Re–membering” and working against erasure and fragmentation drives both Saab and Loutfi. While they both chronicle decades of deep division and conflict, their films are also places of utopia, dreams, and collective imaginaries.

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[i] To date, 21 of Jocelyne Saab's films have been restored by the Association Jocelyne Saab, which formed shortly after her untimely death in 2019. These 21 films include all of the 16mm films Saab herself held as well as her first fiction film, Ghazl al–banat (1985).

[ii] Jocelyne Saab quoted in Rebecca Hillauer, Encyclopedia of Arab Women Filmmakers (The American University in Cairo Press, 2005), 173–176; interview conducted by Hillauer in Paris, December 1994.

[iii] UNRWA was established as a subsidiary organ of the United Nations General Assembly shortly after the 1948 Nakba; it became operational in 1950. The images created to document (and presumably fundraise) for their aid and humanitarian relief work comprise some of the earliest images of Palestine on film and have had a significant impact on the understanding of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination. UNRWA remains operational today, although its staff in Gaza have come under targeted attack by the Zionist entity, who have also attempted to ban the agency as a whole.

[iv] Jocelyne Saab quoted in Olivier Hadouchi, ‘Documenting and Telling the Torments of the World: Interview with Jocelyne Saab’,trans. Sis Matthé, Sabzian, 2014: https://www.sabzian.be/text/documenting-and-telling-the-torments-of-the-world

[v] She also produced a report for French TV on Saddam Hussein's war on the Kurds in 1974.

[vi] Saab, ‘Documenting and Telling the Torments of the World’.

[vii] She goes on to relay an extraordinary anecdote: "After the ceremony, some young volunteers came up to me, and one of them asked me if I could give him my Ray Ban glasses. I replied, ‘It’s a birthday present. I can’t give them to you,’ a little ashamed of my lack of generosity. Three years later, I was shooting Beirut, Never Again. Every morning between 6am and 10am, when the fights were less intense, I crossed a fighter wearing a pair of Ray Ban glasses. He called me by my first name and told me that he and his group had a day off in Beirut after taking the oath. During his passage in the capital, he bought a pair of Ray Ban glasses. Then, he was supposed to take part in a special operation with his group but one of them cracked and the project did not materialize. The meeting was surreal. Two days later, I went back to the same place and looked for the Ray Ban fighter on that same barricade: his comrades told me that a shell had torn his head off. That’s an example of daily life during the war." [Saab, ‘Documenting and Telling the Torments of the World’.]

[viii] Momtaza Mehri, ‘Outliving the Wolves: The life and legacy of Heiny Srour’, bywayofnoway, April 29, 2025: https://bynoway.substack.com/p/outliving-the-wolves.

[ix] Saab said she did not know who had given her permission to board the boat until an encounter with Elias Sanbar. [Saab, ‘Documenting and Telling the Torments of the World’.]

[x] The only other reporters on board were Liberation journalist Selim Nassib and photographer Fouad Elkhoury.

[xi] Mathilde Rouxel notes that Saab’s original edit was revised and several passages of the interview with Arafat were cut in the TF1 version.

[xii] Arab Loutfi quoted in Hillauer, Encyclopedia of Arab Women Filmmakers, 81–93); interview conducted by Hillauer in Cairo, June 1995.

[xiii] Artist Oraib Toukan wove together tapestry of voices reflecting on this beguiling photograph after seeing a Facebook post by historian Sherene Seikaly, which read: “Today on the anniversary of the #Intifada we honor all the Palestinians who have taught us the texture of feminism, what it looks like on the ground, how it is based in love. Among these teachers is Michelline Awad, pictured here in her iconic yellow heels, who explains: “It was an uprising from the heart.” ‘An image in question with Zeina G. Halabi, Sherene Seikaly, Shuruq Harb, Irmgard Emmelhainz, Hanan Toukan, Wendy Shaw, and Sa’ed Atshan: https://opencitylondon.com/non–fiction/issue–4–peculiar–forms/an–image–in–question/  

[xiv] Loutfi quoted in Encyclopedia of Arab Women Filmmakers, 81–93.

[xv] Loutfi quoted in Encyclopedia of Arab Women Filmmakers,. 81–93.

[xvi] Akomfrah quoted in Johanne Løstrup, Co-existence of Times – A conversation with John Akomfrah (Sternberg Press, 2020).

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Elhum Shakerifar is a poet, translator, producer and curator; she runs London-based production company Hakawati ("storyteller" in Arabic).​