At the 39th European Film Awards, to be held on 16 January 2027 in Athens, in recognition of her unique contribution to the world of film, the European Film Academy will present Hiam Abbass with the European Achievement in World Cinema Award for her outstanding body of work. 

Abbass was born in Nazareth as the child of a Palestinian family that was forced into exile in 1948. She started her acting career at the Palestinian National Theatre El-Hakawati in East Jerusalem, which was regularly closed by the Israeli authorities. During a theatre tour through Europe, she decided to leave Palestine for London and has been living in Paris since the late 1980s. Throughout her Palestinian, Arab and international career, she has acted in over 100 films, among them Paradise Now by Hany Abu-Assad and Blade Runner 2049 by Denis Villeneuve, and more recently Palestine 36 by Annemarie Jacir, In a Whisper by Leyla Bouzid and Atonement by Reed Van Dyk.

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Abbass has twice been nominated for the European Film Awards, in both cases for her performances in movies directed by Eran Riklis: she was nominated for the People’s Choice Award for The Syrian Bride and for European Actress for Lemon Tree, which earned her an Asia Pacific Screen Award. Her turn in Philippe Van Leeuw's In Syria saw her nominated for the French Lumière Awards, and she received a Primetime Emmy nod for her role in the HBO series Succession.  

Apart from her work as an actress, Abbass has also directed a film, Inheritance, which world-premiered in Venice's Giornate degli Autori, the same section that selected her daughter Lina Soualem’s European Film Awards-nominated documentary Bye Bye Tiberias, which returns to her home village of Deir Hanna, and explores her bold choices and her bond with her family.

In partnership with the European Film Academy, the European cultural channel ARTE is highlighting the Achievement in World Cinema Award with a special presentation of films starring Hiam Abbass: The Syrian Bride will be shown on TV and on arte.tv, and Inheritance and Raja Amari's Foreign Body will be made available online on arte.tv.