03/09/2023 - VENICE 2023: Lina Soualem weaves an expert patchwork documentary following the turbulent fate of the resilient Palestinian women in her family, including her mother Hiam Abbass

Hiam Abbass and Lina Soualem in Bye Bye Tiberias

"It’s a story about lost places and scattered memories. The story of my great grandmother, my grandmother, my mother and her aunt; of women who learned to leave everything behind and start all over again". After exploring the paternal history of her family (that of actor Zinedine Soualem) in her first feature-length documentary (Their Algeria [+see also:
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interview: Lina Soualem
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trailer
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trailer
interview: Lina Soualem
film profile], which was unveiled in a Special Screening within the 80th Venice Film Festival’s Giornate degli Autori event and which will soon move on to Toronto, gracing the TIFF Docs line-up.

"Don’t pick at the wounds of the past": this was the response which the director - born in Paris 30 years ago and the first woman in her family to not be born in Palestine - would always hear whenever she tried to find out more about her family. But the filmmaker suspected that behind the images (captured on video) of her summertime infancy spent in Deir Hanna, 29 kilometres from swimming outings at Lake Tiberias, "hides the reality of a place at risk of disappearing at any time", "a treasure" in her memory likely to fall into oblivion, and a need to find her place in the history of the women in her family. She has subsequently thrown herself into an incredibly personal investigation where the intimate interlaces with the upheavals of history, homing in on her lineage and starting with her great grandmother Um Ali, whose happy life in the same town of Tiberias was shattered by the Israeli-Arab war in 1948.

Forced to leave their home, the family wandered along roads all the way to the border with Lebanon, where they lost one of the daughters, Hosnie, who ended up stranded in Syria (and who would spend the rest of her life in Yamouk, the biggest Palestinian refugee camp in the world, only getting to see her loved ones 30 years later in secret). They turned back and made their home in Deir Hanna, since occupied Tiberias was now out of bounds for them. Um Ali’s husband, a farmer, "lost his mind and died of grief, and Um Ali found herself alone. She had eight children and a sewing machine to keep them all alive". Next comes the story of her grandmother, Nemat, a primary school teacher with ten children, one of which was Hiam, whose life choices (becoming an actress and going into exile) clashed profoundly with her parents’ traditions and who would only reconnect with her family following Lina’s birth.

By way of photos, videos (both private and televised), letters, poems (penned by Hiam as a teen), texts written in the first person by the director and read by her mother, and present-day trips to Deir Hanna and Tiberias, Lina Soualem deftly weaves an affecting  ceremonial patchwork for the women in her family, with Gladys Joujou in charge of editing and Amine Bouhafa lending her great musical talent to the work. Suffused with the scents of Palestine, the film is an instructive and touching mosaic where past and present overlap, and a keen sense of heritage and transmission shines through.

Bye Bye Tiberias is produced by French firm Beall Productions, in co-production with Belgium’s Altitude 100 Production and Versus Productions, and Palestine’s Philistine Films. Worldwide sales are entrusted to Switzerland’s Lightdox.

(Translated from French)

Photogallery 03/09/2023: Venice 2023 - Bye Bye Tiberias

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Lina Soualem
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