Filmmaker Lina Soualem’s documentary Bye Bye Tiberias is a road movie that comes full circle. It begins with the talk of her family village Deir Hanna, and its borders with Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and memories of bathing in Lake Tiberias. It ends on the same note; with conversations about the borders and a swim in the lake, underlining the nostalgia and the sense of loss with the passage of time. Neither is there the ease to travel freely to the Arab countries under the Israeli dispensation, nor the possibility to swim without a care in the waters of the lake on which, as per the popular lore, Jesus is supposed to have walked.
In the middle of the film span heartbreaking tales of exile. Soualem’s Palestinian maternal family—great grandparents Um Ali and Hosni Tabari getting uprooted, displaced, and dispossessed from their home in Tiberias during the Nakba of 1948.
Refusing to leave the country, they returned home under the new Israeli state to find their house, surroundings, and neighborhoods razed to the ground. Starting life from scratch, it was about having to live with an inexplicable feeling of exile at home.
Then there was her great aunt, Hosnieh, forced to cross the border to become a Palestinian refugee in Syria in 1948 but unable to return home to Tiberias. The third banishment was a self-imposed one, the filmmaker’s own mother Hiam Abbass (of Succession and Gaza Mon Amour fame) left her native place for Europe to fulfill her dream of becoming an actress, in the process leaving behind her grandmother, mother and seven sisters.
“When you fly away it hurts those you leave and yourself too,” she says of the inevitability of the heartbreak. Bye Bye Tiberias, Palestine’s official entry to the Oscars this year, is about four generations of gutsy women of the family who chose their own paths to freedom instead of being cowed down by the limiting political circumstances. Generations of women who “learned to leave everything and start anew”. In the process, they may have lost a lot and gained some but kept the family legacy alive in the face of dispersal and separation with the bond between them only growing stronger with time.
It’s these women and their candid chats that form the spine of the film, specifically the filmmaker’s mother Abbass. Soualem takes her on a trip back to her roots to understand her choices and decisions. Even as she does it, Soualem herself confesses harbouring a strong connection with the place, despite having been born far from the lake, in France. It’s about ties that bind; invisibly, seamlessly.
Together these ladies break the Western stereotype of “Arab women” with their progressive ways. Soualem’s grandmother Namet took pride in teaching while raising ten children and making a mean eggplant-garlic dish. Her mother Abbass was known as the local Don Juan in her youth, sporting a new boyfriend every other day, marrying, and divorcing at will and having a good, cheeky laugh about it in retrospect.
Bye Bye Tiberias is about seeing the past in the light of the present. Juxtaposing the family photographs, video footage of yesteryears and archival material with conversations and poetry readings of today.
By doing so it pieces together the family’s traumatic history and how an individual, relationships, society, culture, and, identity endure cussedly despite attempts to wipe them off the face of the earth. It is accomplished by keeping the family stories alive, telling them to the young, an oral transmission from one generation to the next.
The personal also acquires a collective urgency, especially in the light of the ongoing war in Gaza. As the film itself articulates the fear of the images fading away and sinking into oblivion, it also touches upon the necessity to hold on to “vanished places and scattered memories” in the face of erasure. A timely film that’s for the ages.