Shortly before her death in 2019, Lebanese journalist and filmmaker Jocelyne Saab proposed a collaboration with Palestinian filmmaker and producer Mohanad Yaqubi. The project was never realized, but in the archive-based film Revolutionaries Never Die, Yaqubi finally enters into a conversation with Saab through her films and his own reflections on them. He focuses on Saab’s work from 1973 to 1983, when she filmed in Palestine, Lebanon, Egypt, Western Sahara, and Iran. There she documented political oppression and social inequality, as well as resistance to them.
Yaqubi speaks admiringly of Saab’s militancy and revolutionary belief in change: “Looking at your frames is like seeing the future but with hope.” Yaqubi himself has little of that hope left: like Saab, he lost his home to Israeli bombing. For Saab, that happened in Beirut in 1982; Yaqubi’s home in Gaza was destroyed in 2024. The repetition of violence leaves him speechless, but Saab’s work gives him the strength “to believe again why we make films and for whom.”
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