Bye Bye Tiberias

In her early twenties Hiam Abbass left her village in Galilee for Europe and became an actress. She left behind her mother, her grandmother and seven sisters. Thirty years later her daughter Lina Soualem returns to the village with her, carrying a camera, and asks her mother for the first time: why did you go, what did leaving mean, what did those who stayed live through. The documentary sets four generations of Palestinian women side by side: from the family that had to leave Tiberias in 1948 to the present. Family archives, video recordings from the nineties and historical footage are used together. Soualem builds no grand political narrative; she goes by what the women tell each other and what they do not. The film screened at Venice in 2023.