Once Upon a Time in Beirut

Jocelyne Saab toured the city of Beirut devastated by Israeli bombings. She assesses the number of victims and the extent of the destruction.

When peace seems impossible, any means are justified to defend a political cause. Hence, on the border separating the Palestinian territories that refuse to recognize the State of Israel, the idea of suicide commandos emerges. Jocelyne Saab films teenagers, aged twelve to twenty, who tirelessly train in a secret underground base to become suicide commandos.

Portrait of Raymond Eddé, candidate for the Presidential elections and fervent opponent of the religious war. During the 1975-1976 conflicts he and his team had actively searched for people killed in the war, whether they were Christian, Druze or Muslim.

This film from the heart of the desert shows the conflict between the Algerians and the Moroccans at El Aioun, and the Saharan resistance of the Polisario Front. A never ending story which is still one of the reasons for the conflict between Algeria and Morocco.

Portrait of a French mercenary working in Libya, hired by the Phalange to train the militias. War leaves its traces; and for some, who see death as part of the job, it’s a vocation.

The Iranian revolution leads to the Shah’s downfall and installation of the Islamic Republic. Avoiding the more sensational elements of the news this film questions Iranian society as a whole to try to understand what this wave of change means for the Muslim world.

A portrait of the City of the Dead, an inhabited cemetery just outside of Cairo and on the fringes of the city’s public dumping ground, like a living reproach and a bad conscience. Starting from the City of the Dead, the film shows the populous neighborhoods of Cairo in the grip of hypertrophy and misery, every day more threatened by paralysis.

After living clandestinely in Beirut to escape the Israeli forces, the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), Yasser Arafat, left Lebanon aboard the Atlantis for a new exile in Greece and then Tunis. He talks about his destiny and the future of the PLO. Saab was the only journalist with a camera admitted on the boat.

The cease-fire declared on October 21, 1976, gave the Fedayeen the opportunity to reclaim this area—Fatah territory until it was abandoned in 1970—from the right wing militia. But Syrians and Israelis joined together to neutralise this Palestinian “autonomous force” and imposed a siege on two Lebanese frontier villages, Hanine and Kfarchouba, before attacking them.

Palestinian women, the often-forgotten victims of the Israeli-Palestinian war, are here given a voice by Jocelyne Saab. The film was commissioned by Antenne 2 (France), but it was censured while still in the editing stage and never shown. This print was specially made for this retrospective by the conservation centre at Cinemateca Portuguesa.

In July 1982, the Israeli army besieged Beirut. Four days earlier, Jocelyne Saab sees her house burn and 150 years of family existence go up in smoke. She then takes refuge in questioning: when did this all begin? How did the Beirut people live the siege? Each place will then become a story and each name a memory.

Letter from Beirut documents the filmmaker's return to Beirut during one of the lulls, three years after the outbreak of the civil war, animated by the urge to return. She is confronted by the physical, emotional and psychological ravages of the war, terrified and sorrowful, she cannot find her place in the city. In that quest, she communicates with everyday people, friends, neighbors, people riding the bus across the city's eastern and western flanks. To pace her journeying and dramatic unraveling of the film, Saab borrows the guise of a letter read in a voice-over, written by world-renowned poet Etel Adnan. A rare document from the civil war, Letter from Beirut lays bare and spontaneously how people make sense of their everyday in the midst of chaos, violence, terror and sorrow.

1976 marks the beginning of Beirut’s calvary. With a child’s eyes the filmmaker follows for six months the daily destruction of the city’s walls. Every morning, between 6 and 10am she roams around Beirut while the militia from both sides rest from their night of fighting.

Samar, a child of the war, finds relief from the chaos around her through Egyptian movies she watches on television. Karim, an artist in retreat from life, remains in his apartment in war-torn West Beirut, confident that he is safe in his familiar neighborhood. An unlikely bond is formed between the two as they face the devastating civil war.

A few days after a massacre in a shantytown near Beirut, the director finds the children who survived. She approaches them by offering them crayons to draw. A link is created between them. They let her film their violent games: they repeat the scenes of horror they saw unfold before their eyes ...

A few months after the incident of April 13, 1975, during which Palestinian civilians were machine-gunned by Phalangist militiamen, the toll is most tragic: six thousand dead, twenty thousand wounded, incessant kidnappings, a semi-destroyed capital. This film traces the origins of the Lebanese conflict, the perception of a society that goes to war while singing. A unique document on the Lebanese civil war. Beyond the religious war, the painting of a social and political reality that has not changed much, more than four decades later.