When peace proves impossible, all means are justifiable in defence of a political cause. That’s what the suicide-commandos argue, operating on the frontier separating the Palestinian territories from the land they refuse to accept as Israel. Jocelyne Saab was the first journalist able to film these adolescents, between 16 and 20-years old, who train every day in a secret underground base to become suicide-commandos.
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“Again, just because I listened to such and such member of the Rejectionist Front doesn’t mean that I adopted their point of view. Suicide commandos were something new at the time, a practice that has unfortunately become widespread in the Middle East and elsewhere afterwards. All these reprimands and discussions allowed me to grow artistically and to always reflect on what I was filming: why and for what purpose is an image made? What should be shown and presented? Not for censorship, self-censorship or propaganda reasons. All this provoked in me a useful and necessary reflection on cinema, on the meaning of images and their reception.”
Jocelyne Saab1
- 1Olivier Hadouchi, “Documenting and Telling the Torments of the World. Interview with Jocelyne Saab,” translated by Sis Matthé, Sabzian, 7 April 2021. Originally published as ‘Documenter et conter les tourments du monde’ in a more extended version in La Furia Umana paper#7 (November 2014).
