Hiam Abbass, left, and Lina Soualem in Bye Bye Tiberias (Frida Marzouk/Beall Productions)

Hiam Abbass is an actress you may recognize from Munich or Succession (where she played Logan Roy’s wife). She works regularly on international productions and occasionally big-budget pictures, such as the above-mentioned Munich and Blade Runner 2049. She is also Palestinian, having left her home to move to England and then to France. However, there is very little regarding Hiam’s career in Bye Bye Tiberias. Directed by her daughter Lina Soualem, the documentary is less of a career overview and more of an examination of what Abbass could and could not leave behind and about how the British evacuation of Palestinians in 1948 still affects her family 75 years later.

This is a lot to pack into an 82-minute film, but Soualem manages to weave these themes in with a masterly sense of control. Using home movies, stock and present-day footage, she brings us into her mother’s rambunctious family. It opens with a home video from 1992, in which Soualem and her mother are in a car traversing near the Sea of Galilee, close to where the city of Tiberias sits. In 1948, Hiam’s grandfather was a farmer there. British soldiers evacuated the Palestinian citizens when war broke out with Israel (the region was then part of a British protectorate) and Abbass’s grandfather’s family ended up in a town, Deir Hanna, 30 miles north. They were denied entry to return.

This exile forms the backbone of Bye Bye Tiberias, but the flesh that surrounds it is the love family members have for each other. Most of the film is devoted to Abbass’s devotion to her mother and sisters, and how that bond has persevered through challenges—not just of forced exile, but personal exile as well. Hiam left home to marry an Englishman, which angered her father. Her mother was also upset because she felt that she chose acting over her family. When Soualem asks her mother why she left, Abbass responds that she felt trapped. Eventually, Abbass started returning to her mother’s home for the summer with her daughter. In fact, Lina was 18 months old before she saw her grandmother and extended family.

The film is just as much about Soualem’s identity issues as it is about her mother’s guilt for leaving. Soualem, a French citizen with Palestinian roots, states she is both of and not of either place. Learning about her lineage is her way of healing. Early on, Abbass pulls out old photos of relatives, and the two create a family tree on the wall. This moment is echoed at the end when the family gathers for a funeral and the daughter and mother put those pictures up.

In fact, there are many scenes where we are shown footage of a place as it was in the past and revisit it in the present. It’s as if Soualem wants to highlight the change and also the continuity, or at least the attempt to create continuity. When she visits Tiberias with her mother and grandmother in 2018, the grandmother points out where the mosque used to be and which new building stands on the ground where her old apartment stood.

There is humor to be had as well. When Abbass asks her mother how she managed to have so many kids, 10 in total, when everyone slept in the same room, the mother laughs and reminds her that when she thought her parents were kicking each other, that was not actually the case. In fact, laughter is at play more often than not when the family is together. Soualem emphasizes this, even as she asks questions of her mother that bring up painful memories.

What Bye Bye Tiberias ultimately feels like is an attempt to stitch together disparate memories that were cleaved and rent by exile in order to create a more comfortable quilt, and the stitching that holds the quilt together is love.

Directed by Lina Soualem
Released by Women Make Movies
Arabic and French with subtitles
82 min. Not rated