Real Lives
Mohanad Yaqubi answered Jocelyne Saab's invitation and won Locarno's jury prize
Graphic: Times of Palestine
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In October 2018 the Lebanese filmmaker Jocelyne Saab wrote to Mohanad Yaqubi in Ramallah and asked him to work with her. Two months later she died, and the invitation stayed unanswered.
"Revolutionaries Never Die" is the answer he finally made — and this month it won the Ciné+OCS Special Jury Prize in the Filmmakers of the Present competition at the 79th Locarno Film Festival, which ran from 5 to 15 August in Switzerland. The official Palestinian news agency Wafa reported the win this week.
The film is a conversation with Saab assembled from what she left behind: her images, her words, the historical traces of a career that filmed the Palestinian revolution, the Lebanese civil war and the solidarity movements that carried both across the world.
Yaqubi builds it from rare archive of the 1970s and 1980s and asks the question that hangs over any Palestinian who works with old film — whether revolutionary images survive the passing of the time that made them.
A Ramallah production house and a long apprenticeship#
Yaqubi co-founded Idioms Film in Ramallah in 2004 and has kept an arthouse production company running in a city where distribution, travel and financing are all negotiated around closure.
His earlier features are the same project pursued: "Off Frame AKA Revolution Until Victory" (2016), which recovered the PLO's own film unit and its lost cinema, and "R21 AKA Restoring Solidarity" (2022), built from Japanese-subtitled reels of Palestinian films found in Tokyo.
He belongs to Subversive Film, the curatorial collective that researches and recirculates militant cinema from Palestine and elsewhere, and since 2017 he has taught and researched at the KASK School of the Arts in Ghent.
The new film was produced by Sami Saeed for Idioms Film as a Palestinian-Belgian-Qatari production, with Sourat Films and Escautville co-producing and Square Eyes handling international sales. The prize carries a 25,000-franc promotional campaign on the Ciné+OCS channels and support for a theatrical release in France — which for a Palestinian documentary means the difference between a festival run and an audience.
What the award means at home#
Palestinian cinema has had a strong year of recognition, and each prize does something specific. A promotional campaign and a French release put a Palestinian archive film into cinemas where the archive itself is unfamiliar.
Two filmmakers are honoured in it. Saab, who spent her working life filming this region's wars and the people who lived through them, is given a reply she did not live to hear. And Yaqubi, who has spent two decades finding Palestinian film reels scattered across other people's countries, has taken one more of them back into the light.
