In late Lebanese filmmaker and war reporter Jocelyne Saab’s 1982 film Beirut My City, she can be seen standing in front of her house after it was bombed and destroyed. Belgium-based Palestinian filmmaker Mohanad Yaqubi (R21 AKA Restoring Solidarity, Off Frame AKA Revolution Until Victory) can relate — his family’s house in Gaza was bombed in April 2024. It is just one connection between the two. Another is an invitation that Yaqubi received from the female pioneer to collaborate just two months before she died, which he didn’t answer at the time.
So it’s perhaps fitting that Yaqubi decided to explore the work of Saab during her first decade of filmmaking, from 1973 to 1983. And he does so in his new film Revolutionaries Never Die, which will premiere in the Filmmakers of the Present competition program of the 79th edition of the Locarno Film Festival on Aug. 9.
Yaqubi, who is also the Palestine Film Institute’s public programmer and whose company Idioms Film produced Revolutionaries Never Die, describes the film, a cinematic letter to Saab, this way: “Jocelyne Saab’s film archive from 1973 to 1983 brought forward several questions about the striking resonance between her historical depictions and our contemporary realities five decades later, when no answers can ever be given.” Square Eyes is handling international sales.
