An impressionistic documentary triptych capturing life during wartime—all the hope, all the despair—in Saab’s beloved hometown. In Beirut, Never Again, Saab’s camera explores a city in flames, while writer and painter Etel Adnan provides a lyrical and philosophical accompanying voiceover. In Letter from Beirut, Saab, after some time abroad, returns to find a city changed almost beyond recognition in a few short years, listening to the testimonials of displaced persons, peacekeeping troops, and others who’ve witnessed these momentous changes firsthand. In Beirut My City, a collaboration with director and playwright Roger Assaf made in the aftermath of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Saab pays a visit to the bombed-out shell of her family home, and celebrates the unbroken spirit of those who’ve survived the devastation. A notable work from an artist whose films, per critic Nicole Brenez, “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.”

Beirut, Never Again (Jocelyne Saab, 1976, 35 mins)

Letter from Beirut (Jocelyne Saab, 1978, 48 mins)

Beirut My City (Jocelyne Saab, 1982, 35 mins)

Beirut, Never Again (1976)
Lebanese writer and painter Etel Adnan provides poetic voiceover for what would become the first of Saab’s “Beirut Trilogy,” in which the filmmaker follows the daily destruction of the city. Every morning between 6 and 10am, she roams around Beirut while the militias from both sides rest from their night of fighting.

Letter from Beirut (1978)
Three years after the beginning of the Civil War the filmmaker returns to her city which has irrevocably changed. An epistolary film in which Saab wanders the streets, rides the bus, chats with refugees and reflects on the war’s toll.

Beirut My City (1982)
In July 1982 the Israeli army laid siege to Beirut. Four years earlier Jocelyne Saab saw her 150-year-old childhood home go up in flames. She asked herself: when did all this begin? Every place becomes a historical site and every name a memory. Considered by Saab herself to be her most importan