Hiam Abbass craved escape. At least, that’s what she remembers. As she rifles through a stack of letters she wrote to her parents shortly after her mother’s passing, she is specifically searching for the one she penned to explain to them why she left home, because she can’t quite recall what she said in it. “I think I told them, ‘I’m suffocating, I can’t live here. I need to breathe. I need to find myself.’” Hiam left her native Palestinian village Deir Hanna in her early twenties for Europe to pursue her dream of acting. Thirty years later, you could say that Abbass certainly achieved that: she’s an acclaimed actor of international fame, who has worked both in her home country and Hollywood, under the guidance of such directors as Steven Spielberg and Denis Villeneuve as well as directing in her own right. Many audiences now will most likely recognize her from her recurring role as Marcia Roy on the popular HBO series Succession.
But while that career arc sounds like a fairytale worthy of its own movie, Lina Soualem isn’t concerned with those particular details in her documentary Bye Bye Tiberias. Soualem— Abbass’ daughter—turns her camera on her mother and several other women in her family from different generations to mine their relationship to exile from their homeland, voluntary and otherwise.
Bye Bye Tiberias has been in production since 2018, a testament to the amount of resources Soualem gathered and worked and reworked for the film. Merging home movies and old photos with interviews, poetry readings, and footage of her family shot in the present day for the film, in addition to a couple sequences that lean toward fictional without ever feeling too fantastical compared to the rest of the film— Soualem makes excellent use of her mother’s artistic prowess to stage reenactments of key conversations in her life, such as when she told her father she was in love with an English man and wanted to marry him, knowing he likely would not approve— Bye Bye Tiberias crafts a careful celebration of the collective history and memories of not only one family, but of a people whose history is often scattered or even erased. Soualem’s great-grandmother Um Ali and grandmother Nemet were evicted from their home in Tiberias the Arab-Israeli War of 1948; when they were finally able to return, nothing they remembered of their home remained, and no more Palestinians lived there. Soualem also recounts the story of her great-aunt Hosnieh, who around the same time became a refugee in Syria and was not able to come home. While the nature of Hiam’s displacement is different, the fact that she still left things behind is the same. Soualem doesn’t overly insert herself into her own movie, but her personal ties to the story is still always deeply felt. Bye Bye Tiberias opens with grainy VHS footage of her and her mother swimming in Lake Tiberias, Soualem’s narration stating, “As a child, my mother took me swimming in this lake. As if to bathe me in her story.” With such a wealth of spoken memories and photos and videos that we can see, Soualem brings the past firmly into the present and makes these memories tactile.
There is a lot of grief and pain woven throughout Bye Bye Tiberias, the effects of one’s exile being transmitted from one generation to the next. In reference to the repercussions of her mother’s decision to leave, Soualem states that she “was born of this departure. This fracture. Between two worlds” (Soualem’s father is French-Algerian; her first feature film, Their Algeria, explores his side of the family). Grief of a more universal kind is present too. After the passing of Nemet, Hiam comments on how she believes she needs to more, but doesn’t know how to mourn a mother, how to separate herself from her. The fraught past and present of Palestine and the rapid erosion of Palestinian history hangs over Bye Bye Tiberias as well. But there’s a lot of joy in this film too. Some of the happy moments Soualem captures of her family together are among the movie’s most memorable moments, like Hiam and three of her sisters recounting their childhood, giggling as they reminisce on first loved (they jokingly refer to Hiam as “Don Juan”). Or like the gathering toward the end of the movie, when Hiam and her family line up for a photo, collapsing harder and harder into laughter as they attempt to pose themselves. So much of Bye Bye Tiberias is about their resiliency, but these moments revel in their humor, humanity, and family bonds that no amount of time and distance apart can ever break.
Bye Bye Tiberias is now playing in theaters in New York City and Los Angeles. Runtime: 82 minutes.
Katie at the Movies 