The German film programme will include eight feature films and five shorts produced in the past two years, while the Arab film programme, curated by Egyptian filmmaker Bassam Mortada under the title “From the Family to the Nation”, focuses on the themes of archives and memory. The selection of Egyptian, Lebanese, Libyan, Palestinian, Sudanese, and Yemeni films comprises seven features and six shorts including Goodbye Julia (Sudan), Seven Winters in Tehran (Germany) and The Burdened (Egypt).

The Palestinian documentary Bye Bye Tiberias (2023), directed by Lina Soualem, who co-wrote it with Nadine Naous and made in collaboration with Gladys Joujou had its world premiere at the 80th Venice International Film Festival in the Giornate degli Autori section. It was later screened at Toronto International Film Festival where it received the Grierson Award for Best Documentary. It has also received awards from the London Film Festival and the Montpellier Mediterranean Film Festival.

The main character in Soualem’s documentary is her mother, the famous Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass, who has been in the film industry for years, but had not opened up quite so much about her childhood memories and her long-gone home in the village that she left in the 1980s. Hiam Abbass is famous for roles in films like Paradise Now (2005), Free Zone (2005), Munich (2005), The Visitor (2007), Lemon Tree (2008), Insyriated (2017) and Gaza Mon Amour (2020). She recently became internationally famous for her role as Marcia Roy in the HBO TV drama Succession.

The poignant documentary explores Abbass’ complex identity through her journey from the point when she left her Palestinian village Dier Hanna near Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee’s western shore to pursue her dream of becoming an actress, leaving behind her mother, grandmother, and sisters. It traces Abbass’ first homecoming since the 1980s, which she undertakes with her daughter Soualem, to reconnect with Nemat, Abbass’ mother, who has memories of Palestine before 1948 and the establishment of the state of Israel.

After the Nakba in 1948, many of Abbass’ relatives were expelled to nearby Arab states while Nemat, her children and grandchildren were able to secure Israeli citizenship which afforded them rights, but left them unable to visit family who were forced into exile. It’s a multi-generational portrait of Abbas’ family in which she shows mixed feelings about the place that holds all her childhood memories, the painful confusion of her teens, and her even more painful departure.

The documentary features home-made video tapes of family gatherings and weddings that show the warmth of the family and highlight the exceptional relationship that Abbas had with her father as a child and a teenager, which all changed the moment she told her father of her plans to marry a European and move to France to become an actor. And the viewer can see that, after decades, despite her huge accomplishments, Abbass suffers the consequences of that moment. She can be seen in tears begging her daughter to stop filming when it became too painful to remember.

While the home videos show Soualem as a child during one visit to the village in the early 1980s, after Abbass’ first marriage had ended in divorce, the film shows the impact of all these events on both mother and daughter and how they had to find a home away from home. However, the documentary features a very touching moment when Abbass is finally able to secure a visit to meet her aunt in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria. It was a very moving moment when the reunion took place: the way they rushed to embrace each other physically as a metaphor for their yearning for family and homeland.

This personal mother-and-daughter documentary exploits the complexity of Palestinian displacement through the three generations of Abbass’ family starting with the Nakba, and benefits from Abbass’ dedication to the project despite the painful memories.

Bye Bye Tiberias is Soualem’s directorial debut and its screenings at major festivals offered a close and detailed insight into intergenerational trauma, displacement and its lingering consequences to a broad audience, especially at such a time while Gaza and Palestine as a whole suffer what has been called a second Nakba.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 19 September, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly