In front of an emotional audience in Marrakech, a documentary about Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass, which shows how four generations of women in her family were shaped by exile, debuted.
Actor Hiam Abbass, from Palestine, “learned to leave everything and start anew,” following in the footsteps of her family’s generations of women who were shaped by exile and left their home to pursue their dreams of being in movies thirty years ago.
One of the tales featured in her director daughter Lina Soualem’s documentary “Bye Bye Tiberias” is this one. The film’s debut in the Arab world on Saturday night at the Marrakech International Film Festival was met with cheers of “Long Live Palestine” and a standing ovation.
The documentary follows Abbass and Soualem as they laugh, cry, and narrate the tale of four generations of women in their family. It is the Palestinian submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature, which will be given out next year.
The film “Bye Bye Tiberias” made its world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival in October, over a month before the latest Israel-Hamas war broke out due to the terrorist group’s lethal incursion into Israel.
It is the only Palestinian film competing in Marrakech, where, in contrast to previous years, festival organizers have opted not to screen films in a well-known square that has been the scene of anti-war demonstrations.
Soualem and Abbass acknowledged during the documentary’s Saturday introduction that it was an emotional moment to screen the movie, considering the kids and grandkids of Palestinian refugees in Gaza.
When asked how the war going on today affected people’s reactions to her film, Soualem declined to comment. Speaking carefully afterwards, she acknowledged that she understood the emotional reaction of festival goers in the US and Europe and mentioned her focus on providing an alternative Palestinian story in the context of current affairs, humanizing Palestinian women and the difficult decisions they face throughout their lives.
In an interview with The Associated Press on Sunday, she stated, “We are grieving for all the deaths and destruction that are occurring in Gaza. Our hearts are heavy.”
“Bye Bye Tiberias” is a narrative intercut with intimate interviews with Soualem’s family, particularly her mother Abbass. Abbass is well-known to both Arab and Western viewers for her roles in the television series Succession and Ramy, as well as movies like The Lemon Tree (2008), Blade Runner 2049 (2017), and Gaza mon amour (2020).
In a time of economic hardship and conflict, it builds on Soualem’s first documentary, “Their Algeria,” a personal story of her grandparents’ flight from North Africa and subsequent relocation to France.
In contrast to other Palestinian stories that concentrate on the Gaza Strip, the occupied West Bank, or the wider diaspora, “Bye Bye Tiberias” tells the story of a family that was uprooted from one modern-day Israeli city to another during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Although they kept their citizenship, they lived in a Palestinian village that was mainly cut off from Jewish Israeli society.
In contemporary Tiberias, Abbass pushes her wheelchair-ridden mother Nemat past dilapidated mosques and Hebrew street signs while Soualem describes how her grandmother’s education was completely turned upside down by the 1948 war, which “propelled her at full speed into history.”
Archival footage from 1948 and clips from home movies that Soualem’s father took at their family’s Deir Hanna home are intercut with intimate interviews.
The family was given an order by the British to leave Tiberias, a city near the Sea of Galilee, later that year. Subsequently, the house was demolished, the family was forbidden from going back, and its members dispersed throughout the world, resettling in Syria and Deir Hanna, a Palestinian village inside the boundaries of present-day Israel.
In the documentary, Soualem narrates, “These images are the treasure of my memory that I don’t want to fade.”
Living in such conflict “suffocated” Abbass, who moved to France thirty years ago to follow her acting aspirations, a generation later.
“I wish I could ask my mother today if she forgives me for choosing to do something that went against her customs and way of life,”
Because she didn’t want to “open the gate to past sorrows,” Soualem claims that Abbass kept her daughter’s departure from the Middle East a secret for a significant portion of her daughter’s life.
But she does in the movie. In addition to depicting Abbass’ decision to leave a place that has significant personal meaning for her, Soualem also shows Abbass grieving the loss of her mother, recalling her time spent performing in Jerusalem’s Palestinian National Theatre, and staring across the Sea of Galilee as she tries to comprehend the enormity of what happened to Palestinian families like hers after 1948.
