Synopsis
In 1982, Jocelyne Saab’s 150-year-old family home burns down. In tandem with the Lebanese playwright Roger Assaf, she decided to travel through her city, which was under siege by the Israelis, and to report on the situation in Beirut, the departure of the Palestinians and the incomprehension of the civilians who were suffering from the war.
A word from Tënk
“Here it is, this is my home… Here is what’s left of it.”
Thus begins Beirut, My City, Jocelyne Saab’s documentary, which charts the course of a profound meditation on the city, on memory, and on what remains when everything seems destroyed. Beirut is not only a field of ruins, but also an assemblage of fragments of life and pieces of oneself scattered over the years.
In July 1982, as the Israeli army besieged Beirut, Jocelyne Saab watched her family home go up in flames. This intimate loss became the starting point for a broader question: how does a city under siege live, breathe, resist? How does a place become an embodied memory?
The film rejects the cold distance of traditional reportage. It lingers instead on the stubborn presence of those who remain. Military trucks, peace signs, displaced people carrying their animals and rugs—these familiar images punctuate a portrait that is both lyrical and cruel, turning it into a visual and sonic elegy, or perhaps the obsession of a woman who refuses to let her city sink into oblivion.
Chantal Partamian
Filmmaker and archivist
