After the revolutionary Lebanese documentary director Jocelyne Saab saw Mohanad Yaqubi’s Off Frame (2016), which concerned militant Palestinian filmmaking and its attempts to reclaim the country’s narrative through cinema, she proposed that they collaborate on a film together. To Yaqubi’s profound regret, he delayed his response to the suggestion. Saab died in 2019, two months after sending her introductory email.
Yaqubi was highly curious to understand why she had reached out to him, and therefore undertook, together with Mathilde Rouxel, Saab’s confidante and assistant during the last decade of her life, an odyssey through everything that Saab made between 1973 and 1983, comprising 115 reels of film, every item carefully catalogued and annotated by Saab herself, and housed at CNC. Yaqubi’s resulting documentary, Revolutionaries Never Die, represents “four or five years of my life just trying to undo that moment of not responding,” he tells BDE.
What emerges in the film is Saab’s utter dedication to recording both the complexities and hardships of Arab existence over this turbulent decade, with primary focus on the Palestinian revolution and political machinations in Lebanon, with further analysis of the Polisario Front’s struggle against Morocco a year after the declaration of independence of the Sahrawi Republic, the 1977 bread riots in Cairo, and the social and political inequities that were highly evident in post-revolutionary Iran.
“Revolutionaries Never Die is an homage to an independent Arab woman filmmaker working at a turbulent time, who dedicated her life to documenting places and people who no longer exist,” Yaqubi writes. “In today’s conflicted present, looking to the past as a way of resolving to impact the future is the main objective.”
“Reflecting on the past is an act that transforms our perception and can challenge our beliefs,” he adds.
The film is also a letter to the esteemed Saab in which Yaqubi poses questions he knows can never be fully answered, yet a dialogue between the filmmakers unfolds. This seeks “to explore unanswered questions around the meaning of political filmmaking, representation on screen, positionality and the aesthetics of revolution in the Arab world,” Yaqubu writes. “The reconstructed narrative imagines Jocelyne’s possible replies, her own voice echoing years later in a world where history is sadly repeating.”
Perhaps the most profound moment of connection between the filmmaker and Saab came after the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, when Yaqubi’s house was razed to the ground. He immediately understood the same dilemma that Saab experienced as she stood before her own bombed out house in Beirut, 50 years before, microphone in hand, reporting directly to camera.
“This is the moment where these two parallel lines – these parallel lives – connect, where I saw something in that scene that personally spoke to me, an opportunity or a chance to mourn, that I was prevented from [doing]… It was fulfilled only by looking at Jocelyne,” Yaqubi tells BDE. He suggests that “perhaps this loss stitched our stories together, like one continuous looping reel,” adding that “writing this letter was my attempt to disrupt the repetition, to believe again why we make films, and for whom.”
In the film he stresses how “looking at your [Saab’s] frames is like seeing the future, but with hope,” emphasising again that “the closer I go to your process, the more I regret not writing to you sooner.”
Yaqubi further describes Saab’s ‘process’ to Business Doc Europe. “What is beautiful about Jocelyn was that she comes from the Nasseri [pan-Arabic] perspective…It’s not only Lebanon, it’s Palestine, Iran, Egypt, Sahara. It’s a perspective which gives you a whole imagination of a region that she felt that she was free to work in. And I feel today we don’t have this freedom.”
“If you look at the 16 or 17 films that she made in that period, they are very dispersed, these scenes. But once you put them all together, suddenly you start to see the life that she was living in,” he adds. “[There is] this idea of being a woman in a world of men…and being interested in the issues of liberation and political justice, which can be very dry topics, but then she always finds the angle to tell a story, whether it’s an old woman, a young boy, a student. [She is performing] the same function as militant cinema, being very political. People are speaking, but then we are seeing them doing normal things of life. And that’s what really attracted me a lot to her – the possibility of making human-approach cinema, but at the same time being politically committed.”
Yaqubi’s own process is somewhat different, he stresses. Also a public programmer for the Palestine Film Institute, he is more a gatherer than a creator, and a willing servant to the cause of preserving Palestine’s cinematic heritage.
“We are a people without archives. We don’t have sovereignty to be able to put things in archives. So our material is always scattered. It exists in every archive in the world,” he tells BDE of the sense of duty he feels. “And we don’t have that inventory that can tell us as Palestinian people where everything is. We live in a genocidal landscape.”
In underlining the need to collect, collate and eventually house the audiovisual archive of his country, Yaqubi cites an all too familiar instance of colonialist injustice.
“I went once to the Imperial War Museum [London] and I saw an album made out of crocodile skin,” he recalls. “You look at it, it’s a British officer from the 30s. There’s [photos of] vacations, his family, but then there the work that he did, and he had photographs of a couple who were dead on their bed in a village around the West Bank. And I was thinking, do the family of this couple know about these images? Does the Imperial War Museum have the right to prevent that family from mourning? It’s like, who owns that image somehow? It’s really about the legality and the whole concept of what is copyright at the end of the day.”
“I think that’s also part of the process of liberating the archives, not only for Palestinians, because this is a South/North post-colonialist issue as well,” Yaqubi adds. “I’m not able to do armed struggle. I’m not able to do political work. I’m not able to do social work. I’m not a doctor. I’m nothing. The only contribution I can make is to save some of these films for the next generations.”
