Bye Bye Tiberias
Lina Soualem
In her early twenties, Hiam Abbass left her native Palestinian village and became an internationally acclaimed actor. Years later, her filmmaker daughter returns there with her.
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.
Credits
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
