The Feminist Cinema of Jocelyne Saab: Women’s Relationships and the Philosophy of Dance in Four Fiction Feature Films

This chapter considers the narrative and aesthetic challenges and creative decisions Jocelyne Saab faced in making her first feature film, Dunia (Kiss Me Not on the Eyes) in 2005. Dunia is a “re-invention” and exploration of many real issues facing Arab women. The film took Saab seven years to make, filmed in Egypt and produced in Egypt, France, Libya and Morocco. Confronted with stark issues facing women in contemporary Egypt, including the continuing tradition of female genital mutilation (then still practiced on 97% of young Egyptian women), as a former front-line journalist and documentary maker Saab found “the truth became too hard to tell”. No longer able to make stories representing reality in Middle-Eastern conflicts, Saab turned to the fictional world of feature film. To understand Saab’s development of narrative and aesthetics in Dunia, this chapter - based on interviews with the filmmaker - melds established screen studies fields including poetics and neo-formalism and the emerging field of script development to discuss the multi-faceted creative process of developing story, metaphor and meaning for the screen.