‘Bye Bye Tiberias’ Weaves Stories of Mothers, Daughters and Palestine’s Borders

Exile, the poets say, is a state of mind as much as a fact of geography. It’s no less true if the leave-taking is by choice rather than by force.

Lina Soualem’s compelling documentary, Bye Bye Tiberias, seeks to convey her mother’s experience of living her entire adult life a continent away from her birthplace and family. A parable of freedom, pain and beauty, Bye Bye Tiberias (playing Friday, March 8–Sunday, March 10 at the Roxie) traverses four generations to tell a universal story of defying parental expectations.

The film’s central subject, Soualem’s mother, is the renowned Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass (who will appear in conversation with Israeli-Palestinian actress Clara Khoury after the Saturday show). Best known these days as Marcia Roy in HBO’s Succession, the France-based Abbass became an international star with the politically charged Middle Eastern dramas Paradise Now and Lemon Tree, and the Hollywood epics Munich and Blade Runner 2049.

But Abass’s story, as told in this film, really starts a dozen years before she was born, when her parents fled their home in Tiberias for the Lebanon border during the Arab-Israeli War of 1948. One of their daughters had already crossed into Syria, and they planned to follow her. But then the father, a farmer, couldn’t bring himself to leave Palestine. He and Abbass’s mother went back to the Galilee region, settling in the village of Deir Hanna, in what was now (and what remains) northern Israel.

Hiam Abbass and most of her other siblings were born in Deir Hanna, and the family appears to have gone on to live relatively stable, highly educated lives there. (They also eventually reunited, many years later, with their daughter who fled, after she made a surreptitious and risky trip from Syria.) But the trauma of being uprooted from their original home led to the father’s premature demise, according to family lore. Disoriented, he would stand by the road asking passers-by if they’d seen his cows. The events of 1948 are clearly woven throughout both the family’s narrative and the film’s.

Otherwise, Bye Bye Tiberias jumps back and forth in time, beginning with home movies that Hiam Abbass shot in 1992 when she returned to Deir Hanna to present her toddler, Lina, to the family. These opening scenes establish and explain the presence of Lina, the filmmaker, as the narrator, and as her mother’s interviewer in contemporary footage shot in 2018.

They also plant the expectation that Bye Bye Tiberias will be a personal excavation of family and political history for Lina, who was born and raised in Europe. But she stays in the background, for better or worse, rarely onscreen. The filmmaker seems content to let Mom hold the emotional center, along with her grandmother, Um Ali, a direct link to the exile evoked through black-and-white archival footage of the Nakba (which translates to “Catastrophe,” as Palestinians describe their eviction and displacement during and after the 1948 war).

Hiam was born in Deir Hanna, the fifth of eight daughters (and 10 children overall), where some of her siblings still reside. Abbass wrote poetry throughout her adolescence and studied photography in college before moving to Jerusalem to pursue acting — in secret. “Everything suffocated me,” she recalls. “Even the people I loved suffocated me.”

Most modern viewers will applaud Abbass’s artistic ambitions, and see her need to go and grow beyond her traditional family as not just natural but admirable. But at the time, it took a lot of guts, even if she extricated herself from her family and country through a time-honored method: marriage. (Abbass fell in love with an Englishman, she notes. She wasn’t being strategic or calculating, though the relationship had the desired result.)

Abbass’s decision to pursue an acting career abroad was undoubtedly the right one — “I was the child who had to escape,” she says — but it was accompanied by a raft of emotions. Palestine’s entry for the International Feature Film Oscar, Bye Bye Tiberias lets us imagine how it felt to be “the one who left” when Abbass came home for visits, and gives just a fleeting hint of any jealousy and resentment her sisters obliquely expressed.

Her most palpable regret, or greatest twinge of guilt, involves her mother. FaceTime may be the next best thing to being there, but it isn’t the same thing. (And it didn’t exist until 2010.)

“I think we know how to become mothers,” Hiam tells Lina. “But we never know how to separate from a mother.”

Some moviegoers may be inclined to approach Bye Bye Tiberias through a political lens given the terrible present moment of war, suffering and displacement. But the interactions between Hiam and Um Ali ground us in a primary, universal relationship. We get Hiam’s residual sorrow, not for the road not taken but for the price of being true to one’s soul (artistic or otherwise).

Abbass’s self-exile, precipitated by neither political events nor military force, is fraught with layers. Lina Soualem, uninterested in confrontational confessions or celebrity travelogue, has crafted an open-ended and often-moving portrait of the family ties that bind, and the cost of chasing one’s dreams.

‘Bye Bye Tiberias’ runs March 8–10 at the Roxie Theatre (3117 16th St.) in San Francisco. Tickets and more info here.