Jocelyne Saab is the unacknowledged pioneering woman of Lebanese documentary. Lebanese cinema is defined by the country's civil war (1975–90) and so is Saab's film-making career: she started making films at the beginning of the war. While film-making in Lebanon before the war was dominated, as was the whole region, by Egyptian popular cinema, the war really turned Lebanese film-makers’ attention to their own society. Before the war, Lebanese cinema was growing rapidly and had the ambition to outdo Egyptian cinema with genre films such as the Bedouin film, the spy and police film, and the fedayeen film, but since the 1980s the war film has confidently dominated Lebanese cinema (Livingston, 2008: 41). In fact, Lina Khatib writes, the civil war ensured that most film-makers, if they continued to make films during the war, turned to documentary film-making and fictional war films after the war. The cause was threefold. First, due to a re-awakened social and political awareness, film-makers became interested in their own contemporary realities. Moreover, the Lebanese civil war coincided with the worldwide liberation movements, the cinematic interest in Third Cinema and the pan-Arab focus on political realism in cinema, thus raising the awareness in film-makers that the camera could be used as a tool in the struggle and as a means of handling the past, the present and the future of the Lebanese people. Secondly, the war caused a brain drain: producers and directors interested in Egyptian cinema fled the country. There was a sense of ‘exhaustion’ (Livingston, 2008: 41) with the political and sectarian tension in all of Lebanese society, and the civil war was the catalyst which really made them want to pursue their careers elsewhere. Thirdly, a drain on resources followed the destruction of infrastructure, with those who stayed turning to documentary partly out of necessity: a lack of resources and infrastructure led to film-makers re-focusing their activities on the considerably cheaper and practically more independent documentaries. Others turned to making film for video and television, or worked in distribution, exhibition and advertising.