Jocelyne Saab grew up in Beirut, Lebanon. An active member of the Lebanese scene throughout her life, her career spanned war reporting, documentary and fiction filmmaking, visual art and cultural actions.

J. Saab studied economics in Paris, and entered the world of journalism in the early 1970s, first in print media with the support of Etel Adnan (1925–2021), who invited her to write for Lebanese daily newspaper Al-Safa, and then for television. Between 1973 and 1975 she worked for France Régions 3 (FR3), but in 1975 she transitioned to producing only her own films, to preserve her freedom of expression. This independence allowed her to overturn the codes of traditional reportage, inviting poets to narrate over her images.

From 1975 to 1982, the filmmaker primarily covered the wars in Lebanon. She created fifteen films, three of which make up the “trilogie beyrouthine”, a work which captures the artistry of J. Saab’s documentary output: Beyrouth, jamais plus (1976), Lettre de Beyrouth (1978) and Beyrouth, ma ville (1982) were shown widely on French and international television, and extensively programmed on the film festival circuit.

The destruction of J. Saab’s family home and the departure of Palestinian fighters from Beirut following the siege of the city by the Israeli army in 1982 impelled the artist to change her mode of expression. Her first fiction film, shot in the midst of the conflict and entitled L’Adolescente, sucre d’amour, was programmed at the Directors’ Fortnight of the 1985 Cannes Film Festival. A re-edited version was released in cinemas three years later under the title Une vie suspendue. She went on creating works of fiction: Il était une fois Beyrouth, histoire d’une star (1994), Dunia (2005) and What’s Going On? (2009), while continuing to produce documentaries (Les Almées, 1989; La Dame de Saïgon, 1997). Partially constructed from archival footage, Il était une fois Beyrouth was the result of a large project entitled ‘1001 images’, launched in 1991 to gather culturally important films shot in Lebanon. The project led to the restoration of around thirty of the hundreds of films collected, which were then shown across the world as a depiction of Lebanon.

Following the shoot for Dunia in Egypt, which had been fraught with complications, J. Saab turned to photography and video installation. Her first multimedia exhibition, Strange Games and Bridges, presented at the National Museum of Singapore in 2007, considered questions of memory and the eternal return of violence, in the aftermath of the 2006 war. The photo series Le Revers de l’occidentalisme and Architecture duelle (2007) were displayed at various contemporary art fairs (Dubai Art Fair, 2007; Abu Dhabi Art Fair, 2008).

The artist would later direct six videos, commissioned for the inaugural exhibition of the Mucem (Café du genre, 2013). In 2016 she mounted an exhibition of photos and videos at the Institut français in Beirut exploring the condition of Syrian refugees in Lebanon; the exhibition was displayed a second time at the DEPO in Istanbul in 2017 (One Dollar a Day). Her final work was a book of photographs in which she reflected on her career, and on more than fifty years of regional histories (Zones de guerre, 2018).