Jocelyne Saab and CRIFFL: Dismantling Boundaries and Making New Routes for Asian Cinema in Lebanon

This chapter describes the adventure of making new routes for Asian cinema in Lebanon. Known for her work as a war reporter, for her documentaries and her fiction films, Jocelyne Saab is not only a filmmaker, nor a mere image-maker. Though she has explored making images in diverse forms and with various mediums little light has been shed on her role as an agent developing cinematic links between Lebanon and Asia. A firm believer in Lebanon’s integration in the Asiatic continent, her attitude contrasted with the country’s general attitude, mostly looking West towards Europe and the United States, pushing aside its links with the East. In her endeavor to unearth this Asian communality, always through and with cinema, she founded the Cultural Resistance International Film Festival of Lebanon in 2013, bringing Asian films to Lebanese screens. CRIFFL was in essence the first Lebanese festival dedicated to Asian films, and that, in itself, was a political act. As such, this chapter focusing on Saab’s links with Asia and on her work as a cultural agent with CRIFFL, formulating the hypothesis that Saab contributed to the production of a pan-Asian history of Lebanese cinema and of cinema in Lebanon.