There is a specific kind of grief that comes from an unanswered message. In October 2018, Lebanese filmmaker Jocelyne Saab reached out to Palestinian filmmaker Mohanad Yaqubi with an invitation to collaborate. He never replied. Two months later, she was dead. Revolutionaries Never Die is his answer, arriving about seven years too late and exactly on time.
The film, which world premieres in the Filmmakers of the Present competition at the 79th Locarno Film Festival on August 9, works through sixteen of Saab's films made between 1973 and 1983 — a decade during which she documented the Lebanese Civil War, the Palestinian resistance, the Iranian revolution, and the crumbling of the Arab world she grew up believing in. Yaqubi co-wrote the film with Mathilde Rouxel, who had been Saab's own assistant in her final years, and worked through 115 film reels to reconstruct her voice and her vision.
If you don't know Jocelyne Saab yet, that's sort of the point. She made over forty films across her career, and her work was selected at Cannes, Sundance, and Toronto, but for a long time her archive sat in bad copies, difficult to program and easy to overlook. Yaqubi himself admits he came to her work late. What pulled him in fully was deeply personal: his family's house in Gaza was bombed in April 2024, and he was invited to screen one of her films just days after it happened. Watching her 1982 film Beirut My City, in which Saab stands before her own bombed home, the parallels were impossible to ignore.
What makes this documentary worth tracking down is the specific way it refuses to be just a tribute. It is genuinely a conversation, assembled from images and words and the historical weight of a region that keeps requiring people to document its own destruction. Locarno's artistic director called Saab a filmmaker who documented the region "with an uncanny eye for the future," and that framing is part of what gives this film its strange, painful electricity. The 1970s footage doesn't feel like the past.
Yaqubi is only on his third feature, and he describes this as the first film that truly feels like his own. His previous work, Off Frame AKA Revolution Until Victory, premiered at TIFF in 2016 and screened at the Berlinale, and it's a solid entry point if you want to understand where he's coming from as a filmmaker. But Revolutionaries Never Die sounds like the thing all that earlier work was building toward.
If you want to watch something before Locarno, the Beirut Trilogy — Beirut Never Again, Letter from Beirut, and Beirut My City — is the essential Saab context. Film centers and archives have been screening these with renewed urgency in recent years, and they're exactly the kind of films that remind you why documentary cinema exists at all.
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