REVOLUTIONARIES NEVER DIE (الثوار لا يموتون أبدًا (ALTHOUAR LA YAMOUTON ABADAN)) Documentary

Structured as a cinematic letter to the late Lebanese filmmaker Jocelyne Saab (1948-2019), Palestinian filmmaker and archivist Mohanad Yaqubi explores Saab’s daring and dynamic documentary work from 1973-1983, when she brought her trenchant insight to the complexities of Lebanon’s civil war, as well as events in Egypt, Western Sahara and Iran. Two months before she died in 2019, Saab emailed Yaqubi proposing a collaboration. Yaqubi failed to respond at the time, but now, working with the Jocelyne Saab Association and France’s Centre National du Cinéma (CNC), he has composed an extraordinary homage to a filmmaker little known outside of specialist circles, but whose work from nearly 50 years ago could not be timelier today. Saab began her career as a journalist and war reporter, and her documentary filmmaking remains grounded in reportage, elevated to cinema by Saab’s eye for telling detail and wry commentary. Visiting places and people typically shunned by Western media — exiled Palestinians in Egypt (EGYPT, THE CITY OF THE DEAD), the Sahrawi people in Western Sahara (SAHARA IS NOT FOR SALE), newcomers to Tehran in the early years of the Iranian Revolution (IRAN, UTOPIA ON THE MOVE) — Saab’s films combine perspicacious assessments with poetic image-making. No doubt much has changed since Saab made these films in the 1970s and ‘80s, and yet many of the same conflicts remain. Noting the strategic importance of the Strait of Hormuz in her 1980 documentary on Iran, and both the United States and the Soviet Union’s high-volume dependency on the oil flowing from the region, Saab correctly asserts that “world peace depends on this equation.” Simply as a primer on Saab’s essential documentary work, REVOLUTIONARIES NEVER DIE is a triumph, but Yaqubi also succeeds in crafting a subtle and moving dialogue with the late filmmaker, both of whom lost their homes to conflict, both of whom later lived in exile. For the contemporary viewer sure to discover fresh inspiration from Saab’s historical work, the film’s final admonition, “archives are not to be preserved, but to be activated,” will resonate long afterwards. –Todd Hitchcock