Film Archive

Jahr

Filmstill Bye Bye Tiberias

Bye Bye Tiberias

Bye Bye Tibériade
Lina Soualem
Audience Competition 2023
Documentary Film
France,
Palestine,
Belgium,
Qatar
2023
82 minutes
French,
Arabic
Subtitles: 
English

The actor Hiam Abbass, who lives in France, is one of the greatest movie stars from the Middle East. She played leading roles in the award-winning films of Israeli director Eran Riklis, acted in Steven Spielberg’s “Munich” and recently in the U.S. hit series “Succession.” She served on the juries of the big Festivals in Cannes and Berlin, presented her own directing debut in Venice. But she is also a mother, daughter and sister in a large Palestinian family full of resourceful women. In this real role she steps in front of the camera in her daughter Lina Soualem’s work and travels back to her hometown of Deir Hanna in northern Israel – an Arab village in the Jewish state.

“Don’t open the gate to past sorrows,” the director quotes a kind of family dogma. It refers, among other things, to the family’s traumatic expulsion from Tiberias, the city on the Sea of Galilee, in the 1948 Palestine War. But with her confrontation of the family history, Soualem also opens gates to past joys and allegedly discarded identities. Between home videos, historical archive footage, photos and letters, Abbass is a touching and approachable screen presence as she returns to her roots. The long shadow of her origins also falls on a woman of the world.

Jan-Philipp Kohlmann

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Lina Soualem
Script
Lina Soualem, Nadine Naous, Gladys Joujou
Cinematographer
Frida Marzouk
Editor
Gladys Joujou
Producer
Jean-Marie Nizan
Co-Producer
Guillaume Malandrin, Ossama Bawardi
Sound
Ludovic Escallier, Lina Soualem
Sound Design
Julie Tribout, Benoit Biral, Rémi Durel
Score
Amine Bouhafa
World Sales
Anna Berthollet
Commissioning Editor
Rasha Salti
Filmstill The Mother of All Lies

The Mother of All Lies

Kadib abyad
Asmae El Moudir
Audience Competition 2023
Documentary Film
Egypt,
Morocco,
Qatar,
Saudi Arabia
2023
97 minutes
Arabic
Subtitles: 
German Subtitles for deaf and hard-of-hearing, English

Traumas have often inspired filmmakers to contrast a documentary narrative with visual alienations. Asmae El Moudir chooses the form of a doll-populated miniature of the Casablanca neighbourhood where she grew up. In 1981, before she was born, a massacre took place there. The police and the Moroccan king’s military forces shot hundreds of participants of the so-called bread riots, who were protesting against continuously rising food prices. The detailed small-scale models – El Moudir’s father, a bricklayer, built the big versions with stone and cement! – may illustrate the events, but they also mark the distance to a history that lacks images and has long been concealed in Morocco.

The lack of images is mirrored in the family context. Why are there no childhood photos of her, the director wonders. Why does her mother finally present her with a single picture which, however, shows another girl? This film, cleverly constructed in every respect, finally gathers the family members around the miniatures of their neighbourhood. The constellation does not promise a collective truth, but, at least, a dispute of memories.

Jan-Philipp Kohlmann

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Asmae El Moudir
Cinematographer
Hatem Nechi
Editor
Asmae El Moudir
Producer
Asmae El Moudir
Co-Producer
Mark Lotfy
Sound
Abdelaziz Glassine
Sound Design
Michael Fawzy
Score
Nass El Ghiwane
World Sales
Andrea Hock
Winner of: Golden Dove (Audience Competition)