Bye Bye Tiberias

A film by Lina Soualem

Years after leaving her Palestinian village to pursue an acting career in France, Emmy-nominated Hiam Abbass (SUCCESSION, RAMY, BLADE RUNNER) returns home with her daughter, in this intimate documentary about four generations of women and their shared legacy of separation.

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SYNOPSIS

In her early twenties, Hiam Abbass (Emmy-nominated for Succession) left her native Palestinian village to follow her dream of becoming an actress in Europe, leaving behind her mother, grandmother, and seven sisters. Thirty years later, her filmmaker daughter Lina returns with her to the village and questions for the first time her mother’s bold choices, her chosen exile and the way the women in their family influenced both their lives. Set between past and present, BYE BYE TIBERIAS pieces together images of today, family footage from the nineties and historical archives to portray four generations of daring Palestinian women who keep their story and legacy alive through the strength of their bonds, despite exile, dispossession, and heartbreak.

Palestine’s entry for Best International Feature in the 2024 Academy Awards, this second feature from Lina Soualem premiered at Venice, won the Grierson Award at the BFI London Film Festival, had its North American Premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, and won the shared jury prize at the Marrakech International Film Festival. An important film that beautifully portrays the complexity of Arab women’s lives.

PRESS

"BYE BYE TIBERIAS cements Soualem’s status as a documentary filmmaker to watch."

Variety

"Suffused with the scents of Palestine, the film is an instructive and touching mosaic where past and present overlap, and a keen sense of heritage and transmission shines through."

Cineuropa

"Filmmaker Lina Soualem’s sentimental journey with her actress mother Hiam Abbass becomes a powerful celebration of lives marked by separation, exile and erasure."

Screen Daily

"Unlike other Palestinian narratives, which focus on the broad diaspora, the Gaza Strip or the occupied West Bank, BYE BYE TIBERIAS documents a family displaced by the 1948 Arab-Israeli war from one city to another within modern-day Israel, where they retained citizenship but lived in a Palestinian village largely segregated from Jewish Israeli life."

Aurora Sentinel

"Created by a female filmmaker about the women in her family, BYE BYE TIBERIAS makes no bones about its quiet celebration and gratitude for women's strength... Soualem’s documentary puts a human lens on what can be soulless and cold headlines about the Israel-Palestine conflict."

Media Diversity

SCREENING HIGHLIGHTS AND AWARDS

Palestine’s Entry for Best International Feature, 2024 Academy Awards
Nominated for Best Documentary at Film Independent Spirit Awards 2024
Jury Prize at Marrakech Film Festival 2023
Grierson Award in Documentary Competition at BFI London Film Festival 2023
Award Ulysse Decipro – Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole in the Documentary Competition at Cinemed 2023
Audience Award at FIFAM Festival International du Film d’Amiens 2023
Premio Michele Mancini at Efebo d’Oro festival 2023
Winner, Nesnadny + Schwartz Portrait Documentary Competition, Cleveland International Film Festival
Winner, Cultrera Cuts Editing Award, Salem Fest 2024

Venice Film Festival – Giornate degli Autori (World Premiere)
Toronto Film Festival (North American Premiere)
BFI London Film Festival (UK Premiere)
IDFA (Dutch Premiere)
RIDM (Canadian Premiere)
Marrakech Film Festival (MENA Premiere)
DOK Leipzig (German Premiere)
Chicago Film Festival (US Premiere)
CINEMED (French Premiere)
Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival (South Asian Premiere)
DOC NYC (NYC Premiere)
Palm Springs International Film Festival (Canadian Premiere)
ZINEBI (Spanish Premiere)
Arab Film Festival Tubingen
Bristol Palestine Film Festival
MIDDLE EAST NOW Festival
Efebo d’Oro
Porto/Post/Doc (Portuguese Premiere)
Exground Filmfest
London Palestine Film Festival
ACT Human Rights Film Festival
Cleveland International Film Festival
Milwaukee Film Festival
Chicago Film Festival
Blackstar Film Festival
Santa Barbara Film Festival
Big Sky Documentary Film Festival
Athena Film Festival
Salem Film Festival

ABOUT FILMMAKER(S)

Lina Soualem

Lina Soualem, a French-Palestinian-Algerian filmmaker and actress, was born and is based in Paris. After completing her studies in History and Political Science at La Sorbonne University, she worked as a programmer for the International Human Rights Film Festival in Buenos Aires. Soualem's debut feature documentary, "Their Algeria," premiered at the Visions du Réel International Film Festival in 2020. It won the First Film Award at the CINEMED Montpellier International Festival of Mediterranean Film, the Best Arab Documentary Award at the El Gouna Film Festival, and the Best Documentary Award at the Cinemania Film Festival in 2021, along with a dozen other accolades. Lina Soualem has also acted in three feature films, directed by Hafsia Herzi, Hiam Abbass, and Rayhana. She is currently engaged in writing for fiction, documentaries, and TV series. (12/23)

Credits

Director: Lina Soualem
Producer: Jean-Marie Nizan
Co-Producers: Mohannad S. Malas, Guillaume Malandrin, Ossama Bawardi
Director of Photography: Frida Marzouk
Editor: Gladys Joujou
Composer: Amine Bouhafa

Subject Areas

Feminism Mental Health Women's Movement Islam Middle East Young Women Visual Arts

MATERIALS

Press Kit

The Veiled Hope

THE VEILED HOPE explores the personal and political challenges facing Palestinian women through a series of wonderful portraits of women living on the Gaza and West Bank. The women explain how in their daily lives as doctors, schoolteachers, and activists they are working to rebuild Palestinian cultural identity. They also provide a rare insight into the complex feelings women have surrounding the emergence of political Islamic movements. THE VEILED HOPE gives an in-depth analysis of the position of Palestinian women as they juggle women’s and national liberation struggles.

Learn more

Paradise Lost

Arab Israeli filmmaker Ibtisam Salh Mara'ana grew up in Paradise (Fureidis in Arabic), a small fishing village overlooking the Mediterranean. One of the few Arab communities remaining after the 1948 war, Paradise became culturally and politically isolated as Jewish settlements sprung up around it, and today it is a place defined by silence and repression. This thought-provoking and intimate film diary follows the director’s attempt to recreate the village’s lost history, including the story of her childhood hero Suuad, the legendary local “bad girl” who was imprisoned as a PLO activist in the 1970’s and banished from the community. The director’s frustration builds as her questions are resisted, and her hopes soar when she finally meets Suuad, now a Doctor of Law living in the UK. Stunning cinematography and evocative music underscore the power of Mara’ana’s film, whose lyrical, emotionally charged tone is strikingly honest and straightforward. Presenting the rarely heard voice of an Arab Israeli, this important film offers valuable insight into the contradictions and complexities of modern womanhood and national identity in the Middle East.

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Feminism Inshallah: A History Of Arab Feminism

The struggle for Muslim women’s emancipation is often portrayed stereotypically as a showdown between Western and Islamic values, but Arab feminism has existed for more than a century. This groundbreaking documentary recounts Arab feminism’s largely unknown story, from its taboo-shattering birth in Egypt by feminist pioneers up through viral Internet campaigns by today’s tech-savvy young activists during the Arab Spring. Moving from Tunisia to Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, filmmaker and author Feriel Ben Mahmoud tracks the progress of Arab women in their long march to assert their full rights and achieve empowerment. Featuring previously unreleased archival footage and exclusive multigenerational interviews, FEMINISM INSHALLAH is an indispensable resource for Women’s Studies, Global Feminism, Middle East and Islamic Studies.

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My Terrorist

In 1978, filmmaker Yulie Cohen was wounded in a terrorist attack by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. A stewardess for the Israeli airline El Al, she was attacked along with other crewmembers when getting off the bus to the hotel in London. In a remarkable twist of faith, twenty-three years later Cohen began questioning the causes of violence between Israelis and Palestinians and started to consider helping release the man who almost killed her, Fahad Mihyi. From the time she was a young girl, Cohen considered herself a staunch Israeli nationalist. Growing up in an upper middle class neighborhood in Israel (where her neighbors included future Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Arik Sharon, and military hero Moshe Dayan), she patriotically served in the military. After working as an Israel coordinator on a film shoot and visiting the occupied territories, Cohen came to realize that both Israelis and Palestinians played a role in perpetuating the cycle of hostility and bloodshed. It was her goal to stand up as a survivor and call for reconciliation on each side. An inspiring story of forgiveness, Cohen’s poignant documentary is a moving testimony of human compassion and a call for peace.

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My Israel – Revisiting the Trilogy

Few filmmakers have probed issues of Israeli nationalism and Israeli-Palestinian relations more completely or intimately than Tel Aviv-born Yulie Cohen. In My Israel, Cohen revisits her acclaimed trilogy My Terrorist (2002), My Land Zion (2004), and My Brother (2007) with new footage, fresh perspective, and her trademark fearlessness. For Cohen, Israel is the land of her ancestors, the land her parents fought for during the 1948 war and the land she herself served as an Air Force Officer during the Entebbe crisis. In 1978, working as an El Al stewardess, she survived a terrorist attack in London that killed a colleague and left her with shrapnel in her arm. Embarking on a difficult and emotional journey, she attempts to free the surviving terrorist who attacked her, to question the myths of the state that she grew up in, and to reconcile with her ultra-orthodox brother after 25 years of estrangement. My Israel is an account of remarkable courage and understanding set against the last turbulent decade of Israeli history, successfully combining Cohen’s 10-year oeuvre in an incisive and refreshing new way.

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Mother, Lebanon & Me

A visually striking meditation on loss and a perceptive political critique, this deeply personal work has two subjects: filmmaker Olga Naccache’s ailing mother and the chaotic country where Naccache was raised. Both fell sick in 1975, the onset of incurable depression for one and a bloody civil war ushering in deep divisions for the other. In this sequel to LEBANON: BITS AND PIECES (1994), Naccache ponders the plight of the country she clearly loves while honoring the mother dear to her. Her montage draws on conversations with Naccache's mother toward the end of life, along with footage of this beautiful, accomplished woman and ardent secularist in more physically robust times. Stunning scenes of tranquil Beirut and southern Lebanon contrast with close-ups of a nation under siege from within and abroad. Recent interviews with two longtime friends—a leftist teacher of philosophy in a Christian village school and a Shiite Muslim viewing Hezbollah as Lebanon’s only hope—raise crucial questions about the nation’s identity and precarious future.

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Stateless

STATELESS, from Michèle Stephenson, the critically acclaimed filmmaker of American Promise, looks at the complex politics of immigration and race in the Dominican Republic and Haiti, using a combination of magical realism and hidden camera techniques.

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OUR CATALOG

Bye Bye Tiberias

SYNOPSIS

PRESS

SCREENING HIGHLIGHTS AND AWARDS

ABOUT FILMMAKER(S)

Director: Lina Soualem
Producer: Jean-Marie Nizan
Co-Producers: Mohannad S. Malas, Guillaume Malandrin, Ossama Bawardi
Director of Photography: Frida Marzouk
Editor: Gladys Joujou
Composer: Amine Bouhafa

Subject Areas

YOU MIGHT ALSO BE INTERESTED IN

The Veiled Hope

Paradise Lost

Feminism Inshallah: A History Of Arab Feminism

My Terrorist

My Israel – Revisiting the Trilogy

Mother, Lebanon & Me

Stateless

OUR CATALOG

Bye Bye Tiberias

SYNOPSIS

PRESS

SCREENING HIGHLIGHTS AND AWARDS

ABOUT FILMMAKER(S)

Director: Lina SoualemProducer: Jean-Marie Nizan Co-Producers: Mohannad S. Malas, Guillaume Malandrin, Ossama Bawardi Director of Photography: Frida Marzouk Editor: Gladys Joujou Composer: Amine Bouhafa

Subject Areas

YOU MIGHT ALSO BE INTERESTED IN

The Veiled Hope

Paradise Lost

Feminism Inshallah: A History Of Arab Feminism

My Terrorist

My Israel – Revisiting the Trilogy

Mother, Lebanon & Me

Stateless

Director: Lina Soualem
Producer: Jean-Marie Nizan
Co-Producers: Mohannad S. Malas, Guillaume Malandrin, Ossama Bawardi
Director of Photography: Frida Marzouk
Editor: Gladys Joujou
Composer: Amine Bouhafa