‘Bye Bye Tiberias’ (2023) Review: Fractured Memories in Palestine
“Don’t open the gates to past sorrows.”
What is the role of memory in family and heritage? It’s an important tradition that is passed down from one generation to the next. A history of love, sadness, and stories about the family heritage goes back thousands of years. In Lina Soualem’s documentary Bye Bye Tiberias, Palestinian-born Hiam Abbass, who has starred in Succession, Ramy and Blade Runner 2049, tells the story of the four generations of women in her family.
She traces her life back to her village, where she left to follow her dream of becoming an actress in Europe, to her life in Paris as she reads the poems she wrote about her family. Through Hiam’s eyes, Soualem focuses on her family’s story of displacement during the 1948 Nakba, where 700,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their homes to establish the State of Israel. It’s a story of grief, loss, and resilience that opens the gates to the sorrows of the past.
The documentary begins with home videos of a young Soualem, born in Paris, on her way to Hiam’s village in Deir Hanna, Palestine. The videos show Soualem swimming in the lake, climbing the trees, and talking to her great-grandmother, Um Ali, and grandmother, Nemat, on their balcony, with a young Hiam in the background. Her family vacations were filled with parties, weddings, and reunions of their family.
In 1948, Um Ali and her family were expelled from their native village, Tiberias, and separated from her daughter, Hosnieh, who was forced to live in a Syrian refugee camp and unable to see her family for 30 years. Hiam’s family was refused the right to return to their homes. Um Ali, Hosnieh, Nemat and Hiam’s stories observe generational trauma, a familial bond, the yearning to return home, and shared memories of their collective history and legacy to keep them alive.
Bye Bye Tiberias is a story of exile and resilience. Soualem pieces together this documentary by pasting old photographs of her family and their village on the walls, along with Hiam, to understand their history. Hiam, who left everything in Deir Hanna and started a new life in France, finds it difficult to talk about her life. It’s not a documentary where Soualem sits with Hiam and asks her questions about her life and family.
Instead, Soualem follows her mother, capturing her in the happiest and most vulnerable moments. Hiam finds it hard to look at the camera directly. However, the stories told by Soualem and Hiam fill the gaps in the family’s history of displacement, regrets, sorrows, and heritage using archival footage of the Nakba and home videos in Deir Hanna.
The chronicle of the Abbass family’s life in Deir Hanna begins in 1948. Um Ali and her husband, Hosni, Soualem’s great-grandfather, were forcefully displaced from their native village, Tiberias, along with their eight children. They settled in Deir Hanna, but due to the trauma, Hosni died of grief. After her husband’s death, Um Ali worked as a seamstress to raise her eight children, including Hiam’s mother, Nemat. Despite the aggression, Nemat finished her education and fulfilled her dreams of becoming a teacher.
In the documentary, Hiam, Nemat and Soualem visit Tiberias. Hiam wheels her mother through the neighbourhood to track down the places she can remember. Tiberias is barely recognisable. Their home was demolished decades ago. The only building still standing is the old Mosque, abandoned since the occupation. Now, Hiam stands near the barricade of a lake. The new neighbourhood has new street names, new stories and new lights. She looks around to find places she might remember from Um Ali’s stories.
There are a couple of emotionally charged scenes where Soualem captures the vulnerable moments of Hiam. In one scene set in Paris, Hiam is on a video call with Nemat, who asks her to return to Deir Hanna for a more extended period. Hiam reassures her mother that she will return when her work is over. When the call ends, Hiam is distressed. It’s one of the moments where Soualem captures her in a vulnerable state, considering that she hasn’t opened up about her feelings to Soualem.
In the next scene, Hiam returns to Deir Hanna and bursts into tears. Nemat has passed away, and all of Hiam’s siblings have come together to put the house up for sale. When Soualem asks why, Hiam replies, “This house has no meaning without her.” In the next series of sequences, Hiam and her family reunite with their siblings, take family pictures, talk about Nemat’s life, sing, and reminisce over their lives. It’s a joyous moment that lets the audience glimpse into Hiam and her family’s life in Deir Hanna.
At some point, Soualem sits Hiam and her sisters down. She asks them about Hiam’s romantic life, and there’s laughter and sadness. The sisters talk about Hiam’s many boyfriends and their father’s disapproval of her relationships with them.
In another scene, Hiam returns to the Palestinian National Theatre with her sister, Diana, and meets an old friend and colleague, Amer. On stage, they reenact a scene where, years ago, Hiam asks for her father’s blessing to marry her first husband, an Englishman. Amer, playing her father, leaves the stage without a single word. When the scene ends, Hiam hides her face from the camera. Soualem asks her mother to face the camera, but she solely looks down, perhaps thinking about the memory. Hiam tells her daughter that not a single picture or video was taken from her first wedding, which is in contrast to all the wedding celebration videos shown in the documentary.
Bye Bye Tiberias is a documentary that explores the yearning for family and the devastating results of forced exile and separation. Hiam visited her great-aunt, Hosnieh, who lived in the Syrian refugee camps. Upon her return, she hugged and absorbed the smell of her family back in Palestine, unable to reunite because the State of Israel refuses a Palestinian’s right to return.
Bye Bye Tiberias shows the meaning of belonging to a place. The stories of the Nakba are still present and ongoing as the entire world watches the horrific genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and violent aggressions in the West Bank. The archival footage shown in the documentary is no different to the realities that Palestinians are facing now and have been experiencing for the past 75 years.
Here are some reading materials to learn about the genocide and ethnic cleansing in Palestine and the BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) movement:
Books about Palestine on Verso Books
Books about Palestine on Haymarket Books
