the moving story of a Palestine torn apart by actress Hiam Abbass and her daughter Lina Soualem

Actress Hiam Abbass tells her daughter, director Lina Soualem, the story of her family and their exile from Palestine in “Bye bye Tiberias”, a documentary in theaters on February 21, which recalls the anchoring of Palestinians in their land.

Exile, the fear of seeing everything change overnight and learning to appreciate all the little things. This is the story of Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass. And not just his. That of the women in his family who remained in the country or not. Her sisters, her grandmother, her friends, her aunts and also her daughter Lina Soualem, director of the documentary Bye bye Tiberias, in theaters February 21.

Tiberias is a seaside resort built around Lake Tiberias in Galilee. “All my childhood, my mother took me to swim in this lake”, says Lina Soualem at the beginning of the film. The documentary is a visual book of memories and archival images from Lina Soualem’s maternal family. It is a journey that completes gray areas. Blurred moments of life and a family history that Lina didn’t really know.

“You will bury me and bury my story”

“This literature, this language, how I would have liked you to know it!”, says Hiam Abbass to his daughter after reading a poem in Arabic. “I know how to speak, I just don’t know how to read.”, Lina retorts. Born in Paris, Lina spends her summers in Deir Hanna with her grandmother Neemat. The first woman in the family to be born far from the family village, Lina decides to open “the pains of the pastin order to capture a place threatened with disappearing forever.

The stories of the women in the family are intertwined. First, that of Lina’s mother, Hiam leaving the village at the end of the 1980s to live the American dream and embrace the world of cinema. His international career is marked by his role in The Lemon Trees by Eran Riklis and more recently in the series Succession. The family history is also that of Lina’s grandmother, Neemat, separated from her sister Hosnieh during the Nakba (the forced exodus) of the Palestinians in 1948. It is also that of the great-grand -mother Um Ali who fought to rebuild a home after being chased away.

“Soon I will die, you will bury me and bury my story, my prayers and my memories”, Neemat said sadly. Lina organizes a return to her roots, accompanied by her mother who bursts into tears upon returning to the family home. The wounds are still open. Hiam Abbass is torn by her past choices, leaving everything behind for a life of freedom. We feel in the documentary the unsaid, the unanswered discussions and the pain that accompanies them. We walk with Lina in this house, in these strangely calm streets of Deir Hanna where Palestinians and Israelis seem to live together tolerantly. What will become of this village? Have these houses still been standing since October 7?

Destiny of women

On the family balcony, where Hiam lets his gaze drift into melancholy, we find Lina as a child in an archive video from July 1992. In the documentary, Lina learns more about the fractures that devastated her mother while she was just a child. Hiam Abbass recounts her life far from her family with whom she had cut ties. The weight of traditions, marriage, but above all a city where Hiam is suffocating. The village of Deir Hanna is under the control of the Israeli army. Impossible for the inhabitants to pronounce the word Palestine. No cinemas, no theater. For Hiam, the only escape is writing. Write your wildest dreams, your desires for elsewhere. Hiam Abbass wanted to go beyond borders.

“I was born from this departure, from this rupture between two worlds”, explains Lina Soualem born from the marriage of Hiam Abbass with the actor Zinedine Soualem. Lina’s birth changed Hiam’s relationship with his family. It allowed us to reconnect. The moving journey, rich in personal photos and period videos, allows us to understand the consequences of the Nakba on a family scale.

The story of grandmother Neemat is littered with black and white images of life in Jerusalem in the 1940s. Neemat joins the most prestigious school for teachers. She is one of the best Palestinian students. She succeeds in breaking down prejudices and climbs the ladder. But everything shattered in 1948. At the age of 16, a few months before his graduation, the war broke out. She is kicked out of town with her family. Cohabitation is changing. Broken by wars, Lina’s family learned to survive. Lina Soualem portrays three generations of women and explores their destinies and their strengths. It brilliantly shows how each life journey has contributed to the construction of another. Above all, Lina Soualem shows that the lives of Palestinians are marked by a history and a past engraved in the stone of their land.

The sheet

Gender : Documentary
Director: Lina Soualem
Actors: Hiam Abbass, Lina Soualem
Country : France/Palestine
Duration : 1h22
Exit : February 21, 2024
Distributer : JHR Films
Synopsis: Hiam Abbass left her Palestinian village to pursue her dream of becoming an actress in Europe, leaving behind her mother, grandmother and seven sisters. Thirty years later, her daughter Lina, a director, returns with her to trace the lost places and the scattered memories of four generations of Palestinian women. A true weaving of images of the present and family and historical archives, the film becomes an exploration of the transmission of memory, of places, of femininity, of resistance, in the lives of women who have learned to leave everything and everything restart.