Through present-day footage and family VHS archives, filmmaker Lina Soualem paints a lyrical, deeply personal portrait of four generations of women shaped by exile and longing. Soualem returns with her mother, actor Hiam Abbass, to their Palestinian village, where Abbass once took her swimming in Lake Tiberias “as if to bathe me in her story.” The film captures how its Arab women subjects carry history within them, even as the meaning of home constantly shifts beneath their feet.
EN
“Don’t open the gate to past sorrows.”
Hiam Abbass
“Lina’s research thus appears also one of a cinematic self-awakening, the realization that the ‘treasure that you don’t want to fade’ has already been reimagined and reworked, and the act of filming can help make sense of these ‘hazy bits of information,” a ‘way to find ourselves fully in a world we invented.’
What does remain, then? At a time in history when the need for reflection on identity seems evident, Bye Bye Tiberias unravels both like a personal diary, an intimate and troubled journey of the rich tapestry of Palestinian history and the personal stories embedded within it, and an examination of time and space through images. ‘I have never known happier times than those lived in Tiberias’ seems a sentence each and every one of these women and all Palestinians could have voiced at least once. Soualem’s work is able to reconvene all these stories lost between borders, enforced limitations, separated families, and generational divides into one single place, embracing a universal dimension of nostalgia and hope and paying homage to the history of the women who came before her as much as that of a country on the terrifying verge of losing its.”
Massimo Iannetti1
- 1Massimo Iannetti, “Reverberations through time and space,” Modern Times Review, 13 February 2024.
