Event
SG – Bye Bye Tiberias
Storytelling as an antidote for erasure and oblivion as four generations of women revisit vanished places, scattered memories.
Studium Generale presents Bye Bye Tiberias. Filmmaker Lina Soualem travels back in time and place to capture the stories passed on by four generations of daring Palestinian women in her family.
About Bye Bye Tiberias
In her early twenties, Hiam Abbass (Succession) left her native Palestinian village of Deir Hanna in Galilee to follow her dream of becoming an actress in Europe, leaving behind her mother, grandmother, and seven sisters. She settled in Paris where she had her daughter Lina. Every summer when Lina was a child, Hiam took her to the village to visit the family. Thirty years later, Lina stumbles upon videotapes from the nineties retracing their Palestinian summer holidays. She watches the videos and recognises the familiar faces of the women who marked her childhood: her younger mother, her grandmother Nemat, her great-grandmother Um Ali, her seven aunts. They seem to be the guardians of a temple in which all collective and intimate memories are preserved. Lina realises her mother never spoke about why she left. She decides to return to the village and to question her mother’s bold choices, her chosen exile, and the way the women of their family have impacted both their lives. She revisits lost places, reactivates buried memories, collects untold stories and highlights four generations of daring Palestinian women who keep their story alive through the strength of their bonds. Set between past and present, Bye Bye Tiberias pieces together recent images with family home video footage from the nineties and historical archives to explore how memory, space, femininity, and resistance are passed down from one generation to the next. A journey into the lives of women who had to leave everything and start a new- over and over again.
Bye Bye Tiberias, Lina Soualem, 2023, 82 minutes, English subtitles
Free entrance for WUR-card holders. You can reserve at movieW under ’10-zittenkaart’.
About Lina Soualem
Lina Soualem is a French-Palestinian-Algerian filmmaker and actress, born and based in Paris. After studying History and Political Science at La Sorbonne University, Lina started working as a programmer for the International Human Rights Film Festival in Buenos Aires. Lina’s debut feature documentary Their Algeria, premiered in Visions du Réel International Film Festival 2020.Their Algeria received the First Film Award in CINEMED Montpellier International Festival of Mediterranean Film, the Best Arab Documentary Award in El Gouna Film Festival and the Best Documentary Award at Cinemania Film Festival, among a dozen other awards. Lina acted in three feature films directed by Hafsia Herzi, Hiam Abbass and Rayhana. She currently works as an author on fiction films, documentaries and TV series. She recently worked as a researcher and writing coordinator on the series Oussekine (Disney+).
Filmography Lina Soualem:
- Director of Bye Bye Tiberias, Documentary, 82min, Venice Days, 2023
- Director of Their Algeria, Documentary, 72min, Visions du Réel ,2020
- Writer and researcher of Oussekine, Fiction series, directed by Antoine Chevrollier (Disney+), 2020
- Actress in You Deserve a lover, directed by Hafsia Herzi, Semaine de la critique Cannes 2019
- Director of The Algerian flag &Les archives numériques du Cinéma Algérien, Al Jazeera, 2019
- Actress in I Still Hide to Smoke, directed by Rayhana, produced by Michèle Ray Gavras (KG Productions), 2015
- Second assistant Director in Malgré la Nuit, directed by Philippe Grandrieux, 2014
- Programmer for the Human Rights Film Festival in Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2013