THE FILMS OF JOCELYNE SAAB

Possibly due to the time passed (three years into the war) or because of its epistolary nature, LETTER FROM BEIRUT possesses a more probing quality. There is an attempt to make sense out of senselessness, to record the many, ineluctable ways in which life keeps going on despite the devastation of war. In the second installment of her “Beirut Trilogy”, the director boards a bus to gauge the daily strategies of survival adopted by the country’s men and women. Ordinary reality is haunted by a conflict that has redrawn the coordinates of the everyday, has restricted freedom of movement and inflicted on the population a sense of permanent indeterminacy. Not without a sense of disenchantment, CHILDREN OF WAR reveals how the conflict has monopolized even the imagination of kids who now playfully enact, in their games and school-less days, the horror of war.

CHILDREN OF WAR / LES ENFANTS DE LA GUERRE
1976, 11.5 min, 16mm-to-DCP. In Arabic with English subtitles.

LETTER FROM BEIRUT / LETTRE DE BEYROUTH
1978, 50 min, 16mm-to-DCP

Total running time: ca. 65 min.