Bye Bye Tiberias review – gets under your skin and stays there

Idon’t know how to grieve a moth­er”, Hiam Abbass tells her daugh­ter, direc­tor Lina Soualem, in this documentary/​mediation on per­son­al and geo­graph­i­cal his­to­ry. Hiam (the beloved Mar­cia in TV’s Suc­ces­sion), left her Pales­tin­ian vil­lage over 30 years ago to pur­sue her dream of becom­ing an actress, leav­ing behind her moth­er, grand­moth­er and sev­en sis­ters. Soualem uses the sto­ries of the women in her fam­i­ly to breathe life into the dev­as­tat­ing his­to­ry of their moth­er­land, Palestine.

Blend­ing ten­der inter­views with her moth­er, cam­corder footage from her child­hood and archive footage of Pales­tine before the dev­as­tat­ing 1948 Nak­ba and its after­math, Soualem draws a frac­tured map that illus­trates the dis­ori­ent­ing evo­lu­tion of stolen and aban­doned lands. There is a per­sis­tent ten­sion in the film between the his­to­ry of those who were forcibly dis­placed, and Hiam, who made the autonomous choice to leave.

In an espe­cial­ly heart­break­ing sec­tion, we have the priv­i­lege of meet­ing Nemat, Hiam’s moth­er, as they take her back to the vil­lage of Tiberias, where their fam­i­ly was expelled from to make way for the cre­ation of Israel. Tiberias, of course, is unrecog­nis­able now, more close­ly resem­bling a Euro­pean Cos­ta del Brit strip than a vil­lage in the mid­dle east. The omnipres­ence of the Israeli mil­i­tary in the present-day scenes of Pales­tine makes Hiam’s lip curl fre­quent­ly, it’s a gift to spend so much time with a face so deep in con­tem­pla­tion and mourning.

Though the rich and com­pelling his­to­ry of the fam­i­ly and the land is unde­ni­able, the gen­tle pac­ing of the doc­u­men­tary is effec­tive because Hiam is always at its cen­tre. In con­ver­sa­tion with her daugh­ter and her sis­ters, she is game to relit­i­gate the actions of her youth – mar­ry­ing an Eng­lish man, mov­ing to France to pur­sue act­ing, divorc­ing an Eng­lish man – she shares teenage poet­ry and jour­nal entries and endures bit­ter but lov­ing jibes from her sis­ters (“Your moth­er was a real Don Juan!” they tell Soualem, and, ​“We all paid for your mis­deeds” they tell Hiam).

In one espe­cial­ly mov­ing scene, Hiam vis­its her old act­ing school to recre­ate the moment she told her father that she planned to leave Pales­tine. ​“Turn slight­ly to the cam­era,” Lina instructs, ​“What are you after Lina? It was very hard for me,” Hiam retorts.

The melan­choly aspect of this doc­u­men­tary comes from its sense of patience and a will­ing­ness to sit with and actu­al­ly lis­ten to women who have kept the secrets of their scars, but melan­choly is not a rea­son to avoid it, beyond it being a time­ly edu­ca­tion on the deep famil­ial dev­as­ta­tion of war and dis­place­ment, Hiam is lumi­nous as a doc­u­men­tary sub­ject. The warm rela­tion­ship she has with her direc­tor daugh­ter means moments that could feel voyeuris­tic in another’s hands, only under­score the film’s under­ly­ing mes­sage – the neces­si­ty of matri­lin­eal storytelling.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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