Exile, Gender and Empowerment in Jocelyne Saab’s Films: Gender Café and One Dollar a Day

Jocelyne Saab was an exceptionally courageous Lebanese filmmaker who dealt with the three main topics of war, exile and gender. She produced many documentaries but also fictions, such as her most famous film, Dunia, shot in Egypt on the theme of the female body, pleasure and Female Genital Mutilation. This film was censored in Egypt and lead to severe problems with Egyptian islamists. The theme of gender was also the main topic of a series of six short documentaries created in 2013 entitled Café du Genre, which dealt with women’s situations in the Arab world, but also with other very complex themes such as homosexuality. The films portrayed artists and researchers from the Middle East, especially from Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon and Turkey. In this chapter I will focus on the film about Lebanese choregraph Alexandre Paulikevitch, in which Saab deals, in her very own style and approach, with homosexuality and transidentity in the Arab World. Her latest artistic production from 2016, One Dollar a Day, observed daily life in a Syrian refugee camp in Lebanon. This chapter will discuss in detail these three works of art and their common preoccupation with gendered courage in exile.