The career of Jocelyne Saab (1948-2019), Lebanese journalist, filmmaker, and artist, was as unprecedented as it has been overlooked. Her earliest films predated the Lebanese Civil War (1975-90) but from the mid-1970s she became an important chronicler of that conflict and, in the process, became a key figure in the emergence of a Lebanese cinema. Her extraordinary access as a documentary filmmaker within Lebanon and outside it—whether filming Colonel Muammar Ghadafi, Yasser Arafat, or a ship full of PLO members as they were expelled from Beirut—was matched only by her fearlessness as she shot films within a divided and dangerous Beirut throughout the immediate civil war period and after. In addition to her documentaries, she also made several feature films (including Suspended Life (1985), from which this paper takes its title). Saab’s pioneering documentary work occupied another pole, though: that of the poetic. In collaboration with artists like painter and poet Etel Adnan, Saab developed a creative practice that combined documentary footage with a poetic voice that was manifest in both sound and image. In films like Beirut, Never Again (1976); Letter from Beirut (1978); and Beirut, My City (1982), Saab uses a poetic and essayistic mode of filmmaking to reflect upon both the realities of the war but also on the affective and emotional states that it provoked in Beirut’s population. Saab’s films were personal, essaying what it meant to reside in a city that was eating itself alive; but they are far more than just documents of a past moment. Seen in the context of the present, what Judith Naeff has termed Beirut’s “suspended now,” the films offer a way to understand the contours of personal and collective experience as the city is continually transformed. Saab’s films thus animate issues that are also considered in the work of Lebanon scholars like Chad Elias and Samir Kassir, while exhibiting qualities theorized extensively in Catherine Russell’s work on experimental essay films. Drawing on primary sources regarding Saab’s long history as a filmmaker as well as the scant secondary literature on her, the paper will theorize the ways that her films function as complex meditations on Beirut in a future perfect tense: how they trace a destruction that they propose will have already been repeated by the time we encounter the films.