Canadian Premiere
In 2018, Lebanese filmmaker and war reporter Jocelyne Saab invited Palestinian filmmaker and archivist Mohanad Yaqubi to collaborate. Two months later, before receiving an answer, Saab passed away. Revolutionaries Never Die becomes that delayed reply: a tribute, a conversation, and an act of co-writing through the archive of Saab’s films from 1973 to 1983, in which she documented revolutions and struggles across the Arab world.
Yaqubi, a member of Subversive Film and co-founder of the Palestine Film Institute, has long worked with cinema’s phantom presences, unfinished histories, and militant images that refuse to stay buried. Here, the archive is not treated as a relic, but as a living object that can still question the present. As Yaqubi catalogues and restores Saab’s works, her images become a way to reconsider our present. Selected for its world premiere in Locarno’s Concorso Cineasti del Presente, Revolutionaries Never Die honours Saab’s brilliance while working in partnership with the revolutionary past.
Content Considerations: Racism, police violence, conflict, warfare, guns
Media Partner
Community Partner
Pierre Gemayel, Etel Adnan, Bassim Al-Jassir, Fawwaz Traboulsi, Raymond Eddé
Palestine/Belgium/Qatar
2026
In Arabic, English, and French with English subtitles
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Credits & Director
Executive Producer
Mohamad Jabaly, Elhum Shakerifar
Producer
Sami Saeed, Mohanad Yaqubi
Screenwriter
Mohanad Yaqubi, Mathilde Rouxel
Cinematography
David Denil, Jordi Coppers
Editor
Elettra Bisogno
Mohanad Yaqubi
Mohanad Yaqubi is a filmmaker, producer, and one of the founders of Idioms Film, an arthouse production company based in Ramallah since 2004. He is also a member of Subversive Film, a curatorial collective focused on researching and redistributing militant cinema from Palestine and beyond. Since 2017, he has been a lecturer and researcher at KASK School of the Arts in Ghent. His first film, Off Frame AKA Revolution Until Victory (2016), premiered at TIFF and screened at the Berlinale, Cinéma du Réel, Dubai International Film Festival, and Carthage, among others.
Filmography: R21 AKA Restoring Solidarity (2022)
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