Hiam Abbas, a Palestinian actress based in France, is well-known for her roles in the film Munich and the TV series Succession. In the documentary Bye Bye Tiberians, directed by her daughter Lina Soualem, she had to portray herself. “It wasn’t easy for her. As an actress, she is used to presenting a character in front of the camera. But she gradually came to understand that this is not just her story, but a story of uprooting that resonates with all Palestinians,” said co-writer Nadine Naous, who presented the film introduced in the Horizons section at KVIFF.
The Lebanese filmmaker based in France whose mother had to leave Palestine as a child in 1948, has known the family since 2010. “Lina needed someone who shared her vision of the film, understood the Palestinian context and her family, but was not directly a part of it and maintained some distance,” she explained during the discussion at the Small Hall.
“For me, the film is mainly about transference – how you preserve your history and memory, especially when it’s scattered all over the world and silenced. Recently, my nine-year-old son and I have watched an archival film in the cinema that included a quote from an Israeli prime minister claiming Palestinians and their history will cease to exist. My son looked at me and said: ‘But that’s not true, you exist, grandma exists and so do I’. That’s why I love documentaries, they capture history and images to stay,” said Naous.
