BYE BYE TIBERIAS (TIFF 2023) – Review by Valerie Kalfrin

Hiam Abbas has carved out a notable acting career, appearing recently in projects as diverse as Blade Runner 2049, Ramy, Hellraiser, and Succession.

Yet in the documentary Bye Bye Tiberias, directed by her daughter, Lina Soualem, she’s especially vulnerable. At one point, the two watch footage from a relative’s wedding, where Abbas looks sad amid the music and applause.

“I was suffocating,” she says.

An exploration of memory, separation, and connections fractured but not broken, Bye Bye Tiberias puts Abbas under the microscope, comparing some of her life’s choices with those of her mother and grandmother and the changing landscape around their homeland. Shown at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), the film is a deeply personal, layered journey that demonstrates how we can try to uncover the past but never truly know it.

One of ten children, eight of them girls, Abbas grew up in the small village of Deir Hanna in Galilee at a time when it was under Israeli control. Although close to her siblings, she would write at night as an “escape,” she recalls, sharing poetry and journal entries where she describes feeling lonely and restless. She wanted more than what life in the village would mean.

She left home in her twenties for Europe to start her acting career, causing a rift that healed when Abbas brought Soualem as a toddler to visit the family. Over home movies of the little girl playing games with her grandmother, Nemat Tabari Abbas, and great-grandmother, Um Ali Tabari, Abbas calls her child “an angel that reconciled us.”

Soualem (Their Algeria) incorporates black-and-white archive footage and home movies with interviews featuring her mother and intimate footage of the family. The director, who co-wrote the film with Nadine Naous and Gladys Joujou, grew up in Paris, the first woman in her family to be born outside of Palestine. She recalls in voiceover how her mother took her to Deir Hanna each summer, where they’d swim in Lake Tiberias and her mother would bathe in family stories and memories. Her mother speaks French and Arabic, a language that Soualem can speak but not read.

Um Ali Tabari died when Soualem was ten; Nemat Tabari Abbas died more recently. Although neither left home as Abbas did, each dealt with exile, relocation, and life under the Israeli military.

Abbas’s wanderlust and acting dreams sometimes puzzled them. Abbas shares that Nemat perhaps saw one of her films, but the family never discussed her acting career, except in jest.

Regardless, the family interacts warmly, with good-natured teasing. Before Nemat’s death, Abbas reads a poem that her father wrote about her mother, calling her “the light of my eyes” and describing her kisses. “Wow!” says one sister. Their mother waves her hand and looks away, flustered.

In another moment, Abbas and three sisters chat about Abbas’s first boyfriend, a man whom she didn’t want to marry, just date. She sprung this untraditional thought on her father on the family balcony, her chosen place for intense discussion.

“Your mom was a Don Juan,” one says to Soualem, who is off camera.

“We all paid for your misdeeds,” another says to Abbas. Everyone laughs.

Soualem also revisits Lake Tiberias and other landmarks from her relatives’ life. Some buildings are gone; others have evolved into different businesses. The lake, which looks bare and natural in the home footage, has a walkway with a railing; loud music blares nearby.

Abbas indulges Soualem’s questions, even reenacting some moments from her life with a sibling or a friend. (She does balk at one point, “What is it you want, Lina?”) In press notes, Soualem says a question haunts her: How does a woman find her place when caught between worlds?

Bye Bye Tiberias is her attempt at an answer, but even Abbas is still searching. After Namat’s death, Abbas confides that she doesn’t know how to be without her. She weeps, saying Namat always taught them to forgive others: “I wish I could ask my mother if she forgives me for making a choice that was contrary to her traditions and her life.”