In 1948, Lina Soualem’s great grandmother Um Ali and her husband Hosni were “driven out of Tiberias and propelled into history,” we are told early in director Soualem’s new documentary Bye Bye Tiberias, which documents four generations of women in the director’s family.
The couple were evicted, together with their eight children, from their home by Lake Tiberias (also known as the Sea of Galilee) in Palestine after the founding of the new state of Israel. For Hosni, the eviction was traumatic, and Um Ali soon found herself alone with the children, her one possession a sewing machine.
One of Um Ali’s children was the academically gifted Nemat who graduated from teaching school aged 16 just before the partition of 1948. At which point, “all her dreams came to an end,” we are told, although her greatest pride was to return to teaching after herself rearing ten children – eight girls and two boys. One of Nemat’s offspring was Hiam, whose vibrancy and inherent sense of restlessness, not to mention her artistic skills, determined her to seek a new life as an actress in Paris, which she did very successfully, both on stage and cinema. Hiam’s daughter is Lina Soualem, the film’s director, whom we see as a child in family footage and as an adult as she visits her family back in Palestine. (When she was small, Lina believed she was a direct descendant of Jesus, as it was on the waters of Lake Tiberias that he walked, we are told in the Bible.)
Despite the deep ruptures within the family’s past (which included the desperate isolation of Nemat’s sister Hosnieh, who was on the wrong side of the Palestine/Syria border in 1948 when the evictions began) the bond is strong, at times joyful, and the women’s legacy remains very much alive.
Nevertheless the portraits that Soualem paints, the lives that she chronicles, seem to “each represent a piece of history, a piece of time that doesn’t exist anymore. Even me as a young kid, I’m also representing a piece of time that doesn’t exist anymore because this innocence that I had doesn’t exist.”
“There’s images of us in Gaza in 1995 when I was five years old. And I see myself swimming in the sea and I think of the images of Gaza that I see today,” the director clarifies. “First of all, we don’t have access to the place anymore. And nowadays it’s all destruction and misery and war and kids suffering. And I see myself [in the old footage] as a kid there, playing in the sea – and it’s really disturbing.”
The film is at times dazzling in its choice of archive, such as the vibrancy of life by the lake in 1940, and also very funny as the women of the family join to reminisce and tell Lina about her mother’s “Don Juan” tendencies. “We all paid for your misdeeds,” one sister laughingly tells Hiam.
The film is also immensely moving, whether in the footage of a young Hiam looking pained and “suffocated” at a family wedding or, years later, when she recalls meeting her aunt Hosnieh in a Syrian refugee camp. Hosnieh immediately recognised the “scent of the family” she was long denied access to, and the women embraced “like two magnets.”
We neither see nor hear reference to any of Hiam’s screen work (such as the Dutch Oscar-nominated Paradise Now, the HBO drama series Succession or Blade Runner 2049) but she nevertheless acts out past scenes from her life for her daughter, such as the confrontation with her father when she revealed her desire to marry her first husband. Despite her thespian skills, the business of recreating these scenes isn’t easy. “What are you after Lina?” she asks her director/daughter, clearly moved.
“I think the difficulty for her was to really talk about her intimate life, her personal choices, the path that she has gone through, not as an actress but as a woman,” Soualem suggests. “I think in order to be able to find her path and her place in the world, she has had to face many obstacles, and she has created a sort of protection around herself so that she could carry on. And exchanging with me on this subject…wasn’t easy, but she never refused.”
“It’s not a film about her as an actress or only her, It’s about her as a woman, part of a lineage of women,” Soualem adds. “Of course, her story will always be linked to the stories of others, and it’s not made in a voyeur way that I want to dig into all her intimate things. I just wanted to know more about her path in order to be able to connect it to the others women’s paths.”
How does Soualem herself describe her film? Is she a political filmmaker? “I think it’s a creative work that definitely has a political weight to it,” she responds. “I haven’t really thought of cinema as an apolitical art. For me, it’s very political, also because my first two experiences (her debut doc Their Algeria and her sophomore Bye-Bye Tiberias) have something in common in that they tackle the collective memory through a very intimate lens…Our lives are political due to the context in which we have evolved, and what we have inherited. So for me, I cannot see myself creating films [around] these stories that wouldn’t have a political side.”
The men within Soualem’s family play next to no role in Bye Bye Tiberias, and are only mentioned in passing. That said, in Their Algeria, Soualem told the story of her father (actor Zinedine Soualem) and that of her paternal grandparents. So while she doesn’t give screen time to her dad in her new documentary, she nevertheless offers gratitude to the man who often-time held the camera which recorded the touching and poignant moments from her childhood.
“By filming me, my father placed me in the story of my family’s women…These images are my memory’s treasure. I don’t want them to fade,” Soualem ends.
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