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.
France, Palestine, Belgium, Qatar | 2023 | 82 minutes | Color | French, Palestinian Arabic | Order No. W241310 |
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."
"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."
"Filmmaker Lina Soualem’s sentimental journey with her actress mother Hiam Abbass becomes a powerful celebration of lives marked by separation, exile and erasure."
"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."
"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."
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)
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PROFILED
Profiled knits the stories of mothers of Black and Latino youth murdered by the NYPD into a powerful indictment of racial profiling and police brutality, and places them within a historical context of the roots of racism in the U.S. Some of the victims—Eric Garner, Michael Brown—are now familiar the world over. Others, like Shantel Davis and Kimani Gray, are remembered mostly by family and friends in their New York neighborhoods.
Ranging from the routine harassment of minority students in an affluent Brooklyn neighborhood to the killings and protests in Staten Island and Ferguson, Missouri, PROFILED bears witness to the racist violence that remains an everyday reality for Black and Latino people in this country. Moving interviews with victims’ family members are juxtaposed with sharply etched analyses by evolutionary biologist, Joseph L.Graves, Jr, (The Race Myth) and civil rights lawyer, Chauniqua D. Young, (Center for Constitutional Rights, Stop and Frisk lawsuit). PROFILED gives us a window on one of the burning issues of our time.
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Ovarian Psycos
Riding at night through streets deemed dangerous in Eastside Los Angeles, the Ovarian Psycos use their bicycles to confront the violence in their lives. At the helm of the crew is founder Xela de la X, a single mother and poet M.C. dedicated to recruiting an unapologetic, misfit crew of women of color. The film intimately chronicles Xela as she struggles to strike a balance between her activism and nine year old daughter Yoli; street artist Andi who is estranged from her family and journeys to become a leader within the crew; and bright eyed recruit Evie, who despite poverty, and the concerns of her protective Salvadoran mother, discovers a newfound confidence.
The film Ovarian Psycos rides along with the Ova’s, exploring the impact of the group’s activism, born of feminist ideals, Indigenous understanding and an urban/hood mentality, on neighborhood women and communities as they confront injustice, racism, and violence, and take back their streets one ride at a time.
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Four Wives – One Man
From Nahid Persson, the filmmaker of the award-winning Prostitution Behind the Veil, comes an intimate portrait of a polygamist family in a rural Iranian village. Persson reveals the intricacies of the relationships between the four wives, their husband, their astoundingly free-spoken mother-in-law and their numerous children. Sometimes humorous and often heartbreaking, this film follows the daily lives of the wives whose situation has turned them into both bitter rivals and co-conspirators against their abusive husband.
Persson’s camera unobtrusively and beautifully captures the range of the family’s interactions – from peaceful, pastoral scenes of a family picnic, to the temporary chaos caused by a broken faucet in the kitchen, to a furtive, whispered conversation between two wives about the latest beating. The women’s work – making bread, weaving carpets, milking and herding the sheep – provide the background to their frank conversations. Avoiding sensationalism and sentimentality, this film provides unique insights into the practice of polygamy and its effect on the women involved.
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