How are motherhood, motherland and mother tongue connected? Where is the ‘border’ between past and present? How do those who animate our memories define who we are today? These and many more questions pile up, blend and keep coming back in Lina Soualem’s intimate and deeply personal family portrait, spanning the lives of four generations of Palestinian women and their temporal and spatial relationships, fractures and recollections. By tracing back the history of her mother and actress Hiam Abbass, who 30 years prior left her native village Deir Hanna on the banks of Lake Tiberias to follow her dream of becoming an actress, Soualem crafts a layered diary of her lineage as much as that of her country, as the first woman in her family born outside of Palestine.
Mother and motherland’s bloodline
Interweaving family and archive footage, retrieved readings and direct witnesses, Lina unveils hidden secrets, unspoken departures and never-entirely healed fractures, opening «the gate to past sorrows.» Accompanied by the director’s voice, we are guided through her personal investigation of what occurred before the handful of childhood home videos she still jealously keeps hold of, as she excavates the memories of «women who learned to leave everything and start anew.»
Starting with her most distant ancestor, her great-grandmother Um Ali, whose life was shattered by the Israeli-Arab war in 1948, forcing the family to relocate to Deir Hanna. Her grandmother Hemat, an authoritarian, intimidating school teacher, who had been accepted in a school run by nuns and off to a bright future before her dreams were put an end to by Israeli occupation. Aunt Hosnie, stranded in Syria, in one of the biggest Palestinian refugee camps, and only getting to see her loved ones 30 years later in secret, who introduced Abbas to the idea of freedom. Hiam, a mother in exile in Paris, whose life choices clashed profoundly with her parents’ traditions and had her completely severed the ties with the family, only to reconnect with them following the birth of Lina, «the angel that reconciled us.» And Soualem, who «was born out of this departure, of this fracture, between two worlds» two languages, two cultures and two histories.
Through these interlacing stories, we are confronted with the difficulties of separation, for choice or circumstances, and with the attempt of reuniting with a family that was considered lost, vanished or estranged, but also with the impossibility of coming to terms with the reality of «a place that may disappear any day now.» This story of «vanished places and scattered memories» is one of violence, displacement and annihilation but also of a rooted sense of belonging, cultural preservation and epiphanic border crossing, which, thanks to each family member’s account, takes on new meanings.
Interweaving family and archive footage, retrieved readings and direct witnesses, Lina unveils hidden secrets, unspoken departures and never-entirely healed fractures, opening «the gate to past sorrows.»
Between past and present, recollection and projection
Aided by a score lurking from the depths of memory, by a combination of intimate handheld camerawork and lyrical static shots, and by a subconscious-driven editing style, Soualem’s work attempts to give her country, her family and herself a spatial and temporal shared history, to keep its different, spanning elements together, to retrace its coordinates. Blending personal and political, Lina’s intricate patchwork of images, odours and colours outline the contours of a world where history has impinged on story, past on present, constantly feeding into and reverberating through each other, threatened by a future that put them at risk of sinking into oblivion.
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.»
Time-space continuum
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 hi-story of the women who came before her as much as that of a country on the terrifying verge of losing its. This could not be more timely.
