Mohanad Yaqubi's Revolutionaries Never Die turns Jocelyne Saab's archive into a living conversation

Palestinian filmmaker, producer and archivist Mohanad Yaqubi has built his career around the political life of images. One of the founders of Idioms Film, an arthouse production based in Ramallah, and a member of Subversive Film, a curatorial collective researching and redistributing militant cinema from Palestine and beyond, Yaqubi's work explores the relationship between archives, political struggle and memory.

With a background in mechanical engineering and a Master's in Feature Films from Goldsmiths, University of London, he focuses his research on archival practices within transnational solidarity movements and the politics and aesthetics of cinema.

His films Off Frame AKA Revolution Until Victory (2016) and R21 AKA Restoring Solidarity (2022) similarly revisit Palestinian history and international solidarity through archival material. Since 2017, he has also been a lecturer and researcher at KASK School of the Arts in Ghent, Belgium.

His latest film, Revolutionaries Never Die, a Palestine/Belgium/Qatar production, extends this long-standing engagement with the archive into an intensely personal encounter with Lebanese filmmaker Jocelyne Saab.

The film was awarded the CINE+OCS Special Jury Prize at the 79th Locarno Film Festival, recognising a work that transforms an archival portrait into a meditation on memory, political commitment, destruction and the possibility of dialogue across generations. 

An unanswered invitation 

In October 2018, Saab contacted Yaqubi, proposing a cinematic collaboration. Two months later, she was dead, and Yaqubi realised that his reply would never reach her.

"I was working on another film as well," Yaqubi recalls. "I thought I was going to respond in a week or two but it took me time. Then I heard that she passed away, and the reality struck me: I had missed the chance."

At first, he did not fully understand the magnitude of what had happened. "I didn't really know her work," Yaqubi says. Only two or three of Saab's 16 films were circulating widely.

"I didn't realise the scale of losing the chance of meeting her until I learnt how big and important she was in that scene," he adds.

He also believes Saab's position contributed to her relative invisibility: "Imagine a female filmmaker dealing with political issues, but without being in a political party. Her work was not even recognised that much in the Arab world."

That unanswered invitation eventually became the starting point for Revolutionaries Never Die, which traces Saab's filmmaking between 1973 and 1983 through fragments of her work and her own voice.

The film is a guess not only at why she contacted Yaqubi, but also at what she might have wanted to recover from a period that had profoundly shaped her life. 

"Jocelyne Saab's film archive 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," Yaqubi writes in his director's statement. 

An archive of a vanished world 

Yaqubi approaches archives not simply as collections of historical images but as products of particular political and social circumstances.

"When I'm going to archives, I'm not looking for what is inside the archive, but rather at the social and political circumstances that constituted it," he tells The New Arab.

"And it's impossible for me to understand an archive without understanding the circumstances in which it started and grew."

Saab's archive was particularly revealing because she had assembled it herself. Towards the end of her life, she collected the films she had made during the 1970s and early 1980s and deposited them at the CNC in Paris.

The collection consisted of eleven large boxes containing 115 reels. "We were discovering what she collected and were trying to understand her process of making films," Yaqubi reveals. 

The physical traces of production remained visible. "Many of the film reels were 'copy zero negatives' – the final edited negatives from which screening positives are made. The splices between scenes, handwritten notes on the reels, and handwritten text on the boxes were all still visible, which is why I am showing them in my documentary."

For Yaqubi, these were not merely technical remnants: "Political tensions permeated the celluloid as a historical record."

The collection also allowed him to see Saab's films collectively rather than individually.

"Because it's a collection of 16 films of the same filmmaker and we are seeing them all together at the same time, one stops seeing only the political questions, but also how Saab looked at these topics and how her way of thinking developed from the early 70s to the mid-80s. Which is also a reflection of the geopolitical changes of that world."

Bringing Jocelyne Saab back to life 

Yaqubi worked closely with Mathilde Rouxel, Saab's assistant, during the final six years of her life and was a key figure in preserving her legacy.

Their collaboration began in 2019, after they met in Cannes, and developed into a four-year process of looking through Saab’s films and asking what she might have wanted to revisit. 

But the most powerful discovery came through editing. "What we basically did was select all of the scenes, or the shots where Jocelyne is either speaking, showing up, or working."

Once those fragments were placed together, something unexpected happened: "Once you put all of these in one timeline, you suddenly have a, like it's alive, no? It feels like a film about her. We were feeling all the time in the process that Jocelyne's spirit was with us."

Saab's voice consequently becomes the film's principal thread. Her presence is everywhere – in the footage, in her handwriting, in the sounds and images she left behind.

The archive becomes a form of continuing presence rather than a memorial to someone who has disappeared.  

"The films themselves are a very living archive," Yaqubi claims. "She writes on the cover of the reel, on the negative at the beginning, and at the end. These are traces, and it's like archaeology, no? Like you put all of these elements together and kind of predict what was in the past somehow. We all know there's no firm reality in archaeology, but it's our reflection. It's an interpretation."

Yet there is something he believes can survive: "There is still a line that is real, a line of truth - some sense of justice. And the belief that everybody has a voice."

From Beirut to Gaza 

The project acquired its deepest personal dimension in 2024, when Yaqubi's family home in Gaza was destroyed: "The idea of making a film came when my family was suddenly no more," he admits.

"I was asked to present Beirut Ma Ville, her last film, at the Cinematheque in Brussels just three to four days after my parents' house was destroyed in Gaza."

The connection between Saab’s experience and his own became immediate. In her film, she stands before her demolished family home, with a microphone in hand. Yaqubi found himself confronting a similar image from a radically different moment.

"I was very much emotional about this possibility of mourning, of being able to express the sadness or express the loss somehow," he recalls.

"I was dreaming of going for the last time to see our house, which was, of course, not possible anymore."

Instead, he returned to the archive: "My only source of reconciliation was looking at the material."

Palestine, Lebanon and the cycles of violence 

Saab's work is inseparable from the Palestinian revolution and from Lebanon's complicated relationship with Palestine. She documented refugee camps and Palestinian fighters while also approaching the subject from her own Lebanese identity. 

"Besides my own story, my entry point was looking at the Palestinian history, which Jocelyne was part of, documenting at refugee camps, with the fighters, but also in relation to her Lebanese identity," Yaqubi explains.

For him, this "very conflicted relationship between Lebanon and Palestine" is crucial. "The film was also a homage to the solidarity of the Lebanese with Palestine."

But the political history Saab documented was considerably more complicated than a simple division between Lebanon and Palestine.

Her films reveal the struggle between different Lebanese political forces, the legacy of colonial arrangements and the intervention of regional and international powers.

Yaqubi insists that he is not imposing his own interpretation on the archive: "This is not my perspective but what Jocelyne, who has come from the Lebanese community, has discovered."

The parallels to the present are among the film's most valuable and unsettling aspects. A passage in Saab's work concerning the Strait of Hormuz and the balance between American and Russian power sounds startlingly contemporary. "When I saw this part, I was like, oh my God, it's just exactly like now," exclaims Yaqubi. 

For him, however, the question is not whether Saab predicted the future but why the same cycles of violence continue. "It will keep happening because we have not learned from history," he states. 

The geopolitical forces of Saab's era have not simply disappeared. "The same violence and oppression practices are still happening, and of course, the world leaders, especially the Americans, are not helping with this issue. Not at all."

But the real transformation occurs when these apparently distant political forces interfere in private lives. "What does it mean when you suddenly become personally involved with these questions? When you lose a loved one in a conflict, or a house, or you're not able to travel anymore. This is when these grand geopolitical politics become personal and become a story for a filmmaker."

What survives when people disappear? 

The title Revolutionaries Never Die refers not only to the revolutionary politics that shaped Saab's filmmaking but also to the survival of political memory. Saab died in 2019, yet through her films she remains present.

For Yaqubi, the most precious living archive may actually be her impact: "I think her most living memory is the effect she left on the people she was friends with. I never met Jocelyne Saab, but when I see the people who knew her and were inspired by her, what they remember is a woman with 'a love for life' and 'an amazing sense of refusing injustice.' When something is wrong, she always comes out and speaks up about it. And she was never afraid."

For Yaqubi, that courage is part of what must be preserved. "This is something we have to keep from one generation to another and have to remember."

In the end, Revolutionaries Never Die is a film about an encounter that never happened.

The collaboration Saab proposed could not take place, but her unanswered invitation became the impetus for Yaqubi to enter her archive and begin a conversation across time.

Seven years after an unanswered invitation, Revolutionaries Never Die becomes the collaboration that never happened – and perhaps the answer Jocelyne Saab was asking for all along. 

Mariana Hristova is a freelance film critic, cultural journalist, and programmer. She contributes to national and international outlets and has curated programs for Filmoteca de Catalunya, Arxiu Xènctric, and goEast Wiesbaden, among others. Her professional interests include cinema from the European peripheries and archival and amateur films