Bye Bye Tiberias

The daughter of Succession star Hiam Abbass, documentarian Lina Soualem was urged not to explore her family’s expulsion from Palestine. “Don’t open the gate to past sorrows,” Abbass and her mother, Nemat, would warn. But for Soualem, documenting her family’s history is an urgent undertaking. The result is Bye Bye Tiberias, a haunting examination of generational trauma born from settler colonialism.

Abbass carries the weight of both the documentary and the ghosts of her past – and there is no ghost more ubiquitous than that of her ebbing motherland. In archival footage, we see the Palestine in which her mother was raised, a Palestine that no longer exists; by Lake Tiberias, people go about their day without settler violence and the persistent threat of removal. This is in stark contrast to the area filmed in the present day, colonised, engulfed by Israeli military bases and the constant whir of aircraft above. Abbass’s dying mother is a poignant symbol of a Palestine now lost; during a FaceTime call, she tearfully pleads with her daughter not to abandon her. It’s a devastating exchange that underscores the sorrows of the subaltern.

The documentary plays out like an emergency archival process of solidifying these images and memories of Palestine. With a land and a people being presently displaced and erased, the necessity of this undertaking is not lost on Soualem, who was born and raised in Paris. The displacement of her people is punctuated by her own fractured identity, as she floats between two worlds: one that exists and the hazy memory of the one that was destroyed long ago. Through plaintive narration and sombre photography, Soualem skilfully illustrates the limbo in which the displaced are forced to live.

But Bye Bye Tiberias is more than a harrowing history lesson; it’s a stark reminder of one of the greatest ongoing injustices of our time. Day by day, as bodies mount in their tens of thousands beneath the rubble of Gaza, as families are forced out by settlements in the West Bank, it appears that Palestine lies on the precipice of existence. By telling her family’s story, however painful, Soualem lends a human face to those routinely dehumanised both past and present. There are no resolutions here, but Bye Bye Tiberias is a vital documentation, and indeed a portent, of the trauma inflicted upon the colonised.

Antonia Georgiou

Bye Bye Tiberias is released in select cinemas on 28^th June 2024.

Watch the trailer for Bye Bye Tiberias here: