Telling the Tale of a World in Turmoil: Conversations with Jocelyne Saab 1

This first paper in the collection presents a new and updated edited summary of nine extended interviews that took place over a number of years between Jocelyne Saab and renowned film critic and academic Olivier Hadouchi. These interviews were first published online in 2013 but will be reformatted to reflect on the totality of Jocelyne Saab’s oeuvre. The interviews took place in Paris, between 2010 and 2013. Jocelyne Saab took up the question-response format with great honesty, seriousness of purpose, and patience—remarkably so, since the interviews each lasted several hours. In these interviews she speaks about taking her first steps as a journalist filmmaker, about her first films and experiments with cinema, about her experience as an assistant director on Circle of Deceit (Schlondorf, 1981); about her work across the Maghreb, Egypt, and Asia; and about her video installations. It is a rich text that serves, in this edited collection, as an introduction to the oeuvre of Jocelyne Saab and provides at the same time a platform for readers of the volume to hear from Jocelyne through her own words, as she represents herself in these extended interviews.