Poster for the Palestinian film "Bye Bye Tiberias" (Al Jazeera)

The film “Bye Bye Tiberias” began its journey between festivals at the Venice Film Festival, and then traveled around the world, showing it in Toronto, London, and even El Gouna, and most recently it was shown during the European Film Panorama activities in Cairo.

The documentary film "Bye Bye Tiberias" is directed by "Lina Sweilem", who wrote its own script with "Nadine Naous" and "Gladius Jojo", and it features the director's mother - the international actress - "Hiam Abbas", to tell the viewers the story of her family and 4 generations. One of the Palestinian women who lived the diaspora in its most horrific forms.

4 generations of women

The film “Bye Bye Tiberias” begins with a home video of the director, a girl under 3 years old, swimming with her mother in the waters of Lake Tiberias during her first trip to Palestine, after she was born and lived her early childhood in France.

This shot not only bears an indication of the maternal and filial relationship between Lina Sweilem and her mother, but it looks like a baptism ritual in the Christian religion, as if the mother is placing her daughter in the water of Palestine to insert into the little pores the history of her country that has been systematically erased for decades.

In her film, Lina Sweilem presented two parallel stories, the first about the women of her family across 4 successive generations, while in the background appears the most important narrative, a story whose heroine is Palestine before the Nakba and until today.

The director used several sources for her film, starting with photographs, home videos, Hiam Abbas’s poems, direct dialogue with the film characters, and documentary photos and videos of pre-Nakba and post-Nakba Palestine, but all of these tools fit together like a mosaic painting, just pieces of stone. A small color, but in the end it creates a stunning painting, a painting in which a family history intersects with the history of the entire Arab region.

The story of "Lina Sweilem" begins with her great-grandmother, her mother's grandmother, Hiam Abbas, who is Mrs. Umm Ali, the woman who was displaced from her home during the Nakba, accompanied by her eight children and her husband, Hosni. She lost her husband shortly after, and his heart could not bear the pain of leaving his past. Behind him.

Hosni kept asking Al-Rahhi and Al-Ghadi, Have you seen my house?

Have you seen my cow?

Then he died suddenly, and then she lost her daughter, “Hasnia,” and geographical borders separated them. “Hasnia” was displaced to one of the camps in Syria, while “Umm Ali” went with the rest of her children to “Deir Hanna,” to teach them how to use a sewing machine, and to build a new life for herself. In one of the videos, she appears styling her white locks and saying that she has not felt happy since she left her home and land.

From the movie "Bye Bye Tiberias" (IMDP)

The next generation is represented by the grandmother, “Nimaat,” who was displaced while she was a student at the Teachers’ College. She was expected to provide the first generation of Palestinian teachers, but the Nakba came to ruin all plans, and she moved with her mother to “Deir Hanna,” where she married, worked as a teacher, and gave birth to ten children. Boys and girls, including Hiam Abbas, who takes over the torch from her mother, and her estrangement increases even further after she decided to destroy her family’s hopes by becoming a lawyer or a doctor, learning photography, and then leaving Palestine for France in search of her future as an actress.

The fourth generation comes represented by “Lina Sweilem” herself, a half-Palestinian, half-Algerian woman. She learned the meaning of occupation from the stories of her family, who visited her every year in Palestine, and imbibed the sadness that is passed on like a heavy legacy from generation to generation, to finally present it in the form of an intense cinematic film. Sweetness.

Personal and political

Lina Sweilem followed the story of her father’s family migrating from Algeria to France in her first film, “Their Algeria,” which focused specifically on her grandmother and grandfather, and how they adapted over the years to the idea of ​​not returning to their country, which they left thinking they were going on a temporary trip, to settle down. Far from everything they encountered in the first chapter of their lives.

Director Lina Sweilem uses the term “The personal is political” as her approach in her documentaries.

This term emphasizes the relationships between personal experience and larger social and political structures. The story of the Algerian family immigrating to France is the interface to a larger story about the turbulent period in which Algerians immigrated to France despite the ongoing war between the two countries over independence, and how these immigrants adapted to their exile and created for themselves. A special society within the hostile society.

The story engages with the concerns of the Arab woman, represented by the grandmother, who married while she was still a teenager to a man she did not know, and left her family and land with him, to live a life she did not love for nearly half a century before she separated from him, to start over as she entered the final chapter of her life.

The movie “Bye Bye Tiberias” seems as if it focuses on the history of a Palestinian family of 4 generations, but in fact it is a mirror of the lives of Palestinians before and after the Nakba. The name “Umm Ali” could be changed to the name of any other woman, so we find that we are facing the same character shaped by displacement. And starting over in a strange land, raising children, and resisting the occupation.

Source: Al Jazeera + agencies