Hiam Abbass and daughter Lina Soualem, looking out from the roof of Abbass’ childhood home in “Bye Bye Tiberias.” Photo courtesy of Lightbox
This week’s pick for a local film to see is Lina Soualem’s “Bye Bye Tiberias,” a simultaneously warm, angry and mournful documentary depiction of one Palestinian family’s decades-long experience of the 1948 Nakba during the Arab-Israeli War as told through the lens of a mother (Hiam Abbass) and her daughter (filmmaker Soualem).
WHERE TO WATCH: 7 p.m. Wednesday, March 20, at Space, 538 Congress St., Portland. Tickets are $10, $7 for Space members, available at space538.org.
IF IT SOUNDS FAMILIAR: “Bye Bye Tiberias” was the Palestinian entry for Best International Film (formerly known as Best Foreign Film) for this year’s Academy Awards, although it didn’t make the final list of nominees. (The Academy’s recognition of Palestine as a country is itself mired in controversy.) But more than that, viewers will no doubt recognize Hiam Abbass from her long film and television career. Having just wrapped up her role as Marcia Roy (wife of Brian Cox’s scheming patriarch, Logan Roy, on “Succession”), Abbass has appeared in everything from Steven Spielberg’s “Munich,” Tom McCarthy’s “The Visitor,” Jim Jarmusch’s “The Limits of Control” and Denis Villeneuve’s “Blade Runner 2049,” among dozens of other international films.
THE FILMMAKER: This is the second of Soualem’s documentaries examining her extended family’s life as immigrants and exiles. Her 2020 film, “Leur Algérie,” followed her elderly grandparents as they went through a divorce, using the 62-years-married couple’s troubled life as Algerian immigrants in France as backdrop. Here, she turns to her mother’s story, as a rebellious Palestinian woman who fled her strict Palestinian family’s home to become an actress in France.
The film is admirably cagey about using the accomplished Abbass’ international fame for attention. None of her films are mentioned by name, and viewers unfamiliar with the relationship of director and subject will be left with only the lingering suspicion that they’ve seen the strikingly forthright middle-aged woman at the center of the film somewhere before. Abbass notes in passing that she hardly ever brings up her career with her family. This isn’t a film about celebrity, or even about politics, although current events in Gaza can’t help but inject a thrumming undercurrent of tension to what is, at its heart, a very personal story.
Of course, a personal story partakes of all the forces that shape the people involved, and “Bye Bye Tiberias” carries throughout an inescapable weight of history, pain and resentment. In the formidable Abbass’ ruminations on the events that sent her family fleeing from their home village, the forced separations that spanned generations and that formed her family’s often unspoken sadness, the film fairly vibrates with unexpressed emotion. Late in the film, the now established actor relates the tale of her journey to Syria to visit the aunt she’s been unable to see for 30 years due to what she calls, “the border that Israel imposed on Palestinians from the same family.” (As someone with French citizenship, only Abbass’ French passport allows the Palestinian actor to cross the border.) As a great actress, her story of their reunion emerges with startling vividness, her elderly aunt repeatedly inhaling her famous niece’s scent in a vain attempt to catch the merest whiff of long-lost family.
THE CONTEXT: Any story involving Palestinian people is going to be viewed through a political prism. The ongoing violence in Gaza is never mentioned in “Bye Bye Tiberias” (the film was shot before Hamas and Israel started the current bloodshed), but it’s impossible to watch Soualem’s film without adding context to a conflict that has been constant for nearly a century. What does the film’s context add to that discussion? Good question.
I’m not a historian. I’m not Palestinian, Israeli, Arab or Jew. I’m a privileged white guy of no religious conviction comfortably writing a film review in a land (as yet) untorn by daily sectarian violence, and so I’ll spare everyone with my privileged take on how things should be. Except to say (and you knew there’d be an “except”) that when the “big picture” thinking of nations, religions and ideologies zooms out far enough, it is all too easy to forget about the individual pictures where actual people live their lives. That’s when actual people die.
As Abbass, Soualem and other members of their family gathered to clean up and share one last meal in the crowded house where they grew up, they each plucked out photographs and stuck them to a wall. Photo courtesy of Lightbox
Soualem intermittently reasserts the primacy of that “little picture” through old camcorder footage of her mother clearly chafing under the loving but insular and watchful eye of her family. Of the young director herself as a little girl, happily swimming in the lake that gives the film its name, blissfully unaware of the painful past or uncertain and mournful future. Of actual photographs culled from old folders and pocketbooks in Abbass’ late mother’s home, now for sale. As Abbass, Soualem and other members of their family gather to clean up and share one last meal in the crowded house where they grew up, they each pluck out photographs and stick them to a wall. The mosaic of long-ago memories on the wall of a home due to pass, like them, into memory is powerful.
There’s no proclamation made in “Bye Bye Tiberias” about the plight of the Palestinian people, even as Abbass’ and Soualem’s alternating voiceovers drop snatches of the impossibly painful history of those displaced by the birth of Israel from the literal rubble of destroyed Palestinian homes. Abbass relates one family story of her farmer grandfather, stubbornly turning around from exile to come back to a village that no longer exists and, his mind shattered, living out his days asking passersby, “Have you seen my cows? Have you seen my donkey? Have you seen my life?” If that’s too emotionally manipulative a fact to incorporate into your worldview, then perhaps your worldview is far too removed from humanity.
WHY YOU SHOULD SEE IT: Apart from its timeliness, and the tangible act of supporting Space and programmer Greg Jamie’s efforts to bring challenging, necessary cinema right to our backyard, “Bye Bye Tiberias” is powerful, affecting stuff. It’s sad, certainly. But there’s room for that in a world where individual human feelings are so readily subsumed into sloganeering and heedless, bloody ambition. And it’s amusing at times. Abbass asks her mother at one point how, in their impossibly crowded apartment, she and Abbass’ father managed to have so many kids. “Did you ever notice your mother and father kicking each other?”, the old woman asks with a laugh. Abbass, the world-traveling movie star, finds herself among her loving sisters again, their chatty jibes about how they suffered for Abbass’ youthful flight from home and tradition landing with an unspoken power that’ll be all too familiar to families everywhere. “Bye Bye Tiberias” is a small-scale tale of huge events, and all the more eloquent for it.
Dennis Perkins is a freelance writer who lives in Auburn with his wife and cat.
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