In her early twenties, Hiam Abbass left her native Palestinian village to follow her dream of becoming an actress in Europe, leaving behind her mother, grandmother, and seven sisters. Thirty years later, her filmmaker daughter Lina returns with her to the village and questions for the first time her mother’s bold choices, her chosen exile and the way the women in their family influenced both their lives.
Set between past and present, Bye Bye Tiberias pieces together images of today, family footage from the nineties, and historical archives to portray four generations of daring Palestinian women who keep their story and legacy alive through the strength of their bonds, despite exile, dispossession, and heartbreak.
Following a screening of the 2023 award-winning documentary film Bye Bye Tiberias, director Lina Soualem will join Penn Associate Professor of Arabic Literature Huda Fakhreddine for a wide-ranging discussion and Q&A session with the audience.
Watch the trailer here.
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 Soualem worked as a programmer for the International Human Rights Film Festival in Buenos Aires. Soualem’s debut feature documentary Their Algeria premiered in Visions du Réel International Film Festival 2020, and 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 2021, among a dozen other awards. Lina Soualem also acted in three feature films directed by Hafsia Herzi, Hiam Abbass and Rayhana. She currently works as an author on fiction, documentaries and TV series.
Huda J. Fakhreddine is associate professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition (Brill, 2015) and The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh University Press, 2021). She is the co-translator of Lighthouse for the Drowning (BOA editions, 2017), The Sky That Denied Me (University of Texas Press, 2020), and Come, Take a Gentle Stab: Selections from Salim Barakat (forthcoming from Seagull Books, 2021). Her book of creative non-fiction titled Zaman s̩aghīr taḥt shams thāniya (A Small Time under a Different Sun) was published by Dar al-Nahda, Beirut in 2019. She is the co-editor of Middle Eastern Literatures, an editor of the Library of Arabic Literature, and was the topic director of the Wolf Center's 2023-2024 forum on "Revolution."
