Jocelyne Saab
Lebanon

About the Film
A behind-the-scenes documentary in which director Jocelyne Saab engages the cast and crew of Nahla in conversations about the film. With Farouk Beloufa, Yasmine Khlat, Ahmed Mehrez, Jocelyne Saab, Youcef Saih, Lina Tebbara, and others.

Year: 1979
Runtime: 27 min
Director: Jocelyne Saab

Jocelyne Saab was born in Beirut in 1948. She studied economics in France and then worked in journalism after graduating. She directed more than 30 documentary films, and worked as assistant director with Volker Schlöndorff on The Forger before moving into fiction cinema. Among her feature films are Dunia and La Dame de Saïgon.

“In the mid-1970s, Algeria was very interested in what was happening in Lebanon, particularly because the PLO headquarters were in Beirut, and the Palestinian issue is a central concern for the Arab world … I remember that some senior leaders of the National Liberation Front (FLN) began to wonder if a kind of civil war similar to the one that ignited Lebanon would come to pass in Algeria. I was invited … to present my documentary at the Cinematheque of Algiers, which was then a hotbed of global cinephilia … I had interesting discussions with Algerian filmmakers, like Farouk Beloufa, who discovered Lebanon through my films. Shortly thereafter, he shot Nahla… . Farouk was fascinated by the freedom of speech and movement and the proliferation of ideas of political parties in Lebanon in the seventies.”  Jocelyne Saab