Lina Soualem on Bye Bye Tiberias, Collective History and Documenting the Mother/Daughter Relationship

Words: Rõgan Graham

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Documentary director Lina Soualem’s second film  Bye Bye Tiberias, is an intimate portrayal of four generations of Palestinian women including herself and her mother, Succession actress Hiam Abbass. The daughter of two actors, Soualem’s first film as a director, Their Algeria, turns her camera on her paternal grandparents who left Algeria and settled in France. After 62 years of marriage Soualem wants to understand why they are getting divorced. 

Now, in Bye Bye Tiberias, Soualem tenderly interrogates what it means for a people to be forcibly displaced and the tension between her family who stayed with the ever changing land, and her mother who followed her creative ambitions to Europe. Through archival footage, homevideos and emotional interviews, Soualem reckons with exile, mourning and the necessity of storytelling.

Over the course of our chat, we discussed how she confronted difficult conversations as a director and a daughter, the role of the camera in contemporary life and the art that moves her. 

Were these difficult conversations about displacement and your mother leaving always taking place between the family? Or is it something that the film drew out of them?

These conversations between me and my mother didn't exist apart from the film, because it was all questions that I was asking myself, but I never dared ask her. She didn't find the strength to tell me and I didn't find the strength to like, go at it. And with my aunts I perceived things through the way that they were teasing each other or sometimes telling an anecdote, but it wasn't like deep conversations and real truth that were said. I discovered recently that the etymology of anecdote, means the thing that is kept secret. So I think it's very interesting that anecdotes hit us and we know that there is something else behind it.

I loved the intimacy of the balcony scenes in the film, could you talk a bit about that?

It's funny, because at one point, I thought I was gonna call the film, The Woman on the Balcony! I think the balcony was, like, kind of the place that you remember a lot as a child, it was always the place where people would gather when we were visiting in the summer.  Even my great grandmother sometimes would sleep on the balcony when it was very hot, and she would put her mattress there. I feel like every time I go, the thing that is the same is the balcony when everything around is changing. When the territory is changing, it's much more urban but the balcony and the yellow chairs, you know, these things that are a visual way to root yourself to a place that is in constant transformation. And always at risk of disappearing, when the story you're telling is already a story of erasure and displacement and loss. So it's kind of as if the fear of loss has been transmitted to me. 

“Through documentaries, I really like to link the past and the present and really reflect on transmission and I'm telling stories of people that are part of a collective history that is still not recognised, not written, taboo and silenced.”

Are you meticulous now in documenting your own life?

Not at all. For me, it's not the same, I feel like our generation is already documenting so much because of social media and the way that we relate to image that is much more instantaneous. And I feel like the generations that I filmed are generations that had very few objects to rely on to tell their story. And so the most important thing for me is to try to give visibility to stories that have been invisiblised and marginalised and to people that have not been able to tell their stories, that risk disappearing without having passed on their story, and whose story is not officially recognised. Through documentaries, I really like to link the past and the present and really reflect on transmission and I'm telling stories of people that are part of a collective history that is still not recognised, not written, taboo and silenced. While my life and my story is not.

Considering the current conflict and unreliability of mainstream media, what value do you think the function of the camera serves? 

I would say, beyond camera, it's more like cinema and cinematic storytelling, through documentary or fiction films, that allow subjectivity, which is not allowed in media, when it's actually impossible to avoid. It's kind of a hypocritical position to  say that journalism is objective, when actually it's impossible to be objective. From the moment that as a human being when you tell a story, you will be touched by certain things, and you will prioritise other things. So what I find interesting in cinema is that you create, honestly with your own subjectivity, and you introduce yourself with your own subjectivity.

So it's not a matter of people agreeing or not, it's trying to share, and move and transmit through your own perception. Subjectivity I think it allows to give back humanity to people that are deprived of it or that are stigmatised in the media, when we take the examples of Palestinians, which are stigmatised and dehumanised and referred to only as an abstract, homogeneous, mass, telling a Palestinian story becomes a representation that is not at all conveyed in the mainstream media. And it's, I think it's really similar with literature and, and poetry and art, you're not imposing anything, you're just sharing a perception or sensation, even if it's a political statement, you're sharing your subjectivity.

What was the most interesting thing you learned about your mother during this process?

I think for me, it was really the fact that I discovered so many interesting things about my mother's youth and childhood. I was really fascinated by the fact that she's always been such a dreamer, such a creator already and aspiring to something else from a very young age. It disrupted my preconception, as I always thought that my mother became the woman that she is when she left and when she was in Europe. What I discovered is that she's always been this woman aspiring to cross borders and live somewhere else and be able to live with different identities and complexity without having to justify anything. And I think that really moves me because it gives back strength to the psyche of childhood, of children. It was really impactful.

When did you know you wanted to stage the recreation between your mother and her sister?

I thought of it from the very beginning because I started filming my mother alone, before starting to write, and I saw how difficult it was for her to share intimate moments of her life. As an actress, she's used to speaking about the characters that she plays and the emotion that she grants to characters. So it was a very different thing to be exchanging with a daughter behind the camera. When I felt that she wasn't at ease, I thought that I wanted her to be able to enjoy the process and I knew that what she liked was to act. So I thought, why not ask her to reenact some of these moments that seem too painful to tell in a question and answer or are too complicated to tell, because sometimes, you don't have this distance on your own path. So you can convey the emotions, not really through words, more through gesture, or being brought back to a certain time and place, and see what kind of emotion emerges. 

What pieces of art influenced this work? 

There's a film that I really love, Stories We Tell by Sarah Polley that is a very classical film that everyone tells you about it. But when you see it, it's still very strong in the way that she recreated her family's story in order to understand something about her own story. There's a beautiful Indian film also called A Night of Knowing Nothing. That is not about filming family, but that is more about how she uses contemporary images that she transforms to tell a story of oppression of the Muslim Indian community in India. 

And there's also books of course, of the poet Mahmoud Darwish and Edward Said’s Reflections on Exile. I was reading a lot of articles and texts about exile, what it creates and how it affects your imagination. How do you write about exile? It inspired me to understand what I wanted to say, through this film about these exiles that I was filming.

Bye Bye Tiberias is in UK cinemas from Friday 28 June.