Wednesday, July 15 at 7pm

Presented by Mizna

The Beirut Trilogy comprises three landmark works of Lebanese cinema by photo-journalist and documentarian Jocelyne Saab. Trained as a radio and television journalist, Saab turned her attention to documentary films at the start of the Lebanese Civil War. Saab’s commitment to and intimate interactions with the displaced, the exiled, and the dispossessed, mark her films and her quest to capture Beirut as uniquely her own.

A Several Futures release.

*This screening is also a fundraiser for mutual aid on the ground in Lebanon.*

Direct donations will be encouraged during the event to benefit the Ghassan Abu Sitta Children’s fund, dedicated to providing medical attention to children who need it the most and helping to relieve the medical sector in Palestine and Lebanon.

ABOUT THE FILMS

Beirut, Never Again (1976, DCP, 35 min, French w/ English Subtitles) dir Jocelyne Saab

Every morning, when the nightly battles between militias have ceased, Jocelyne Saab roams around Beirut’s city center filming traces of daily life. Gunfire and song mix with a poetic voiceover written by the Lebanese writer and painter Etel Adnan. The city of Beirut has become a place where everyone, even children, have become soldiers, looters, and scavengers. Yet life persists.

Letter from Beirut (1978, DCP, 52 min, French w/ English Subtitles) dir Jocelyne Saab

Three years after the beginning of the Civil War, the filmmaker returns to her city for several months. Living between Lebanon and France, she tries to readapt to daily life in Beirut. Saab wanders the streets of the irrevocably changed city, rides buses, chats with refugees and peacekeepers, and reflects on the war’s toll during a brief moment of peace.

Beirut, My City (1983, DCP, 38 min, French w/ English Subtitles) dir Jocelyne Saab

Considered by Saab to be her most important film, Beirut My City returns Saab and her collaborator, the playwright and director Roger Assaf, to the shell of her 150-year-old childhood home following Israel’s July 1982 invasion. She films the aftermath of the Israeli siege, even capturing the intimate farewells as members of the Palestinian Liberation Organization withdraw from Beirut. The sound of Israeli jets are constant, yet Saab finds glimmers of hope and solidarity amidst the chaos.

In 2026, Mizna celebrates the twentieth edition of our flagship program, the Twin Cities Arab Film Festival. We mark this milestone with a year-long, multi-venue program, Looking Forward, Looking Back, which centers images from the history of SWANA filmmaking and our past festivals. Through this framework, we confront the visual record, demanding more from the archive than a sentimental look at the past. While SWANA films have been continually plundered, twisted, and aligned to colonial narratives, this year, Mizna’s film programming considers what overlooked, liberatory lessons the past might offer the present and future. With this goal in mind, we present selections by former Mizna festival curators alongside new restorations of SWANA cinema, drawing radical new meanings from the objects that remain.