Lettre de Beyrouth (A Letter from Beirut)

This is Jocelyn Saab's portrait of her hometown just a few years before the outbreak of the Civil War. Born in 1948 in Beirut, Lebanon, Saab studied economics at university, according to her parents’ wish. In 1973, she began her career as radio journalist, working both in Beirut and Paris. In 1975, she went back to her hometown to report on the war that was about to break out in Lebanon, using her camera. War reportage marked Saab’s foray into cinema and would become a distinctive feature of her oeuvre. She was also a photographer and visual artist, and would frequently cross the border between fiction and documentary, making them increasingly osmotic. Her work would cross the Mediterranean Sea, like the Atlantis boat did, when Yasser Arafat was forced to leave Beirut in 1982 and went into exile in Tunis. Saab, who was the only TV reporter accepted aboard, told this story in Le Bateau de l’exil. Her work would also continuously traverse the Middle East, which always was her reference point, reminding her of her own Asian roots. In 1978, Saab decided to spend some time in Lebanon, trying to tell the story of a country that was leaving one war behind while approaching another. Travelling by bus turned out to be the best way to do it, and the reportage suddenly became a neorealist film, in which Italian cinema references mixed with Egyptian, and then a surreal documentary, looking at the present from different perspectives. The voice-over is by Etel Adnan, Saab’s friend as well as a great Lebanese poet and painter, who was born in Ismyrna under the Ottoman Empire.