Hiam Abbass’ Palestinian Family Documentary ‘Bye Bye Tiberias’ Applauded at Marrakech Film Festival 

(L-R) Palestinian actress and director Hiam Abbass and French-Algerian director Lina Soualem pose on the red carpet during the 20th Marrakesh International Film Festival in Marrakech on November 25, 2023. (AFP)
(L-R) Palestinian actress and director Hiam Abbass and French-Algerian director Lina Soualem pose on the red carpet during the 20th Marrakesh International Film Festival in Marrakech on November 25, 2023. (AFP)
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Hiam Abbass’ Palestinian Family Documentary ‘Bye Bye Tiberias’ Applauded at Marrakech Film Festival 

(L-R) Palestinian actress and director Hiam Abbass and French-Algerian director Lina Soualem pose on the red carpet during the 20th Marrakesh International Film Festival in Marrakech on November 25, 2023. (AFP)
(L-R) Palestinian actress and director Hiam Abbass and French-Algerian director Lina Soualem pose on the red carpet during the 20th Marrakesh International Film Festival in Marrakech on November 25, 2023. (AFP)

Thirty years ago, Palestinian actor Hiam Abbass left her home to pursue her dreams of being in the movies, joining generations of women in her family who were shaped by exile and “learned to leave everything and start anew.”

That's one of the stories told in her director daughter Lina Soualem's documentary “Bye Bye Tiberias,” which received a standing ovation and shouts of “Long Live Palestine” on Saturday night at the Marrakech International Film Festival for the film's first screening in the Arab world.

The documentary, the Palestinian entry for next year's Academy Award for Best International Feature, follows Abbass and Soualem as the mother-daughter pair laugh, cry and tell the story of four generations of women in their family.

“Bye Bye Tiberias” first premiered at the Venice International Film Festival, more than a month before the start of the latest Israel-Hamas war, sparked by the militant group's deadly incursion into Israel on Oct. 7.

It is the only Palestinian film in competition in Marrakech, where festival organizers have, unlike past years, not held screenings in a popular square that has seen protests against the war.

Introducing the documentary on Saturday, Soualem and Abbass acknowledged it was an emotional time to present the film, thinking about the children and grandchildren of Palestinian refugees in Gaza.

Soualem declined to answer a question about how today's war affected reactions to her film. Speaking carefully, she later said that she felt the emotional response from festival audiences in Europe and the United States and noted her emphasis on offering a different Palestinian narrative amid current events, humanizing Palestinian women and the complex choices they make throughout their lives.

“Our hearts are heavy, seeing everything happening in Gaza — all the destruction and all the deaths, which we are mourning,” she said in an interview with The Associated Press on Sunday. “Every screening, there is a sense of repair and warmth. There’s a lot of people who feel that they cannot speak or they are silenced.”

“Bye Bye Tiberias” splices together intimate interviews of Soualem's family members, primarily her mother, Abbass, known to both Arab and Western audiences from her work in the television series “Succession” and “Ramy” as well as films such as “The Lemon Tree” in 2008, the Blade Runner 2049 in 2017, and “Gaza mon amour” in 2020.

It builds off Soualem's first documentary “Their Algeria” — another personal history about her grandparents' exile from North Africa and move to France amid war and economic downturn.

Unlike other Palestinian narratives, which focus on the broad diaspora, the Gaza Strip or the occupied West Bank, “Bye Bye Tiberias” documents a family displaced by the 1948 Arab-Israeli war from one city to another within modern-day Israel, where they retained citizenship but lived in a Palestinian village largely segregated from Jewish Israeli life.

Abbass rolls her mother Nemat in a wheelchair past Hebrew street signs and a now-dilapidated mosque in modern-day Tiberias as Soualem explains how the 1948 war upended her grandmother's education and “propelled her at full speed into history.”

Intimate interviews are spliced with excerpts from home movies shot by Soualem's father at their family's home in Deir Hanna, and archival footage spanning back to 1948.

That year, the British ordered the family to leave their home in Tiberias, a city on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. The home was later destroyed, the family was prohibited from returning and its members resettled far and wide, including in Syria and Deir Hanna, a Palestinian village within the borders of modern-day Israel.

“These images are the treasure of my memory that I don’t want to fade,” says Soualem, who narrates the documentary.

A generation later, living amid such tension “suffocated” Abbass, who emigrated to France three decades ago to pursue her dreams of becoming an actor.

“Today, I wish I could ask my mother if she forgives me for making a choice that was contrary to her traditions and her life,” Abbass says at one point in “Bye Bye Tiberias.”

For much of her daughter's life, Abbass rarely talked about her departure from the Middle East, not wanting to “open the gate to past sorrows,” Soualem says.

In the film, though, she does. Soualem captures Abbass mourning the loss of her mother, remembering performing in Jerusalem's Palestinian National Theatre, and peering across the Sea of Galilee trying to digest the enormity of what happened to Palestinian families like hers post-1948, as well as her choice to leave a land that holds great meaning to her.



How the World’s Press Rated Paris’s Olympics Opening Ceremony

Former French football player Zinedine Zidane holds the Olympic torch during the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games in Paris on July 26, 2024. (AFP)
Former French football player Zinedine Zidane holds the Olympic torch during the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games in Paris on July 26, 2024. (AFP)
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How the World’s Press Rated Paris’s Olympics Opening Ceremony

Former French football player Zinedine Zidane holds the Olympic torch during the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games in Paris on July 26, 2024. (AFP)
Former French football player Zinedine Zidane holds the Olympic torch during the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games in Paris on July 26, 2024. (AFP)

Paris broke with tradition on Friday by turning the Olympic Opening Ceremony into a parade down the River Seine rather than a stadium-based show.

TV viewers around the world were treated to a spectacle performed on bridges, the riverbank and rooftops, culminating with French athletes Marie-Jose Perec and Teddy Riner lighting the Olympic cauldron and a performance from Canada's Celine Dion.

However, the 6,000-odd athletes, 3,000 performers, 300,000 spectators and dozens of world leaders had to endure heavy rain for much of the event.

Here's how the world's media judged Paris's ambitious ceremony:

FRANCE

Newspaper Le Monde wrote in a rave review that director Thomas Jolly "succeeded in his challenge of presenting an immersive show in a capital transformed into a gigantic stage".

Right-leaning Le Figaro said the show was "great but some of it was just too much". It said viewers "could have been spared" images including an apparent recreation of the painting of The Last Supper of Jesus and his apostles in front of a fashion show.

UNITED STATES

"Opening Ceremony Misses the Boat" headlined the New York Times's television review.

It wrote that the river parade "turned the ceremony into something bigger, more various and more intermittently entertaining. But it also turned it into something more ordinary — just another bloated made-for-TV spectacle".

The Washington Post was more glowing, noting that the organizer's "bold thinking" brought a shine back to an event that has seen its popularity wane in recent years.

CHINA

China's Xinhua state news agency said the ceremony succeeded in showcasing France.

"There were Can-Can girls, a homage to the reconstruction of Notre Dame and of course the French Revolution, with fireworks, heavy metal and singers who appeared to have lost a battle with the guillotine.

"If there was a downside to the ceremony, it is that any event performed over such a long distance has to struggle with continuity, and the big difference between this ceremony and others is that the parade of athletes was mixed in with the performances."

SOUTH KOREA

South Korean media noted the "impressive" imagination of using the whole city as the backdrop but the event was overshadowed by the country's team being misintroduced as North Korea.

South Korea's CBS radio said while the incident was no doubt an honest mistake, it was disappointing the Paris organizers failed at what should have been a very basic part of the event.

GERMANY

"As beautiful as it was mad," wrote Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine. "France revolutionized the opening ceremony ... by the end even the rain had been defeated."

Tabloid Bild was bowled over by Celine Dion's return to the stage after four years, defying illness to "sing just as in the best of times. She deserves a gold medal for this performance."

BRITAIN

British tabloid The Sun joked "Wet The Games Begin!" on its front page alongside an image of the Eiffel Tower surrounded by laser beams, and described the ceremony as spectacular.

The Daily Mail's headline read "La Farce!", mainly in reference to the train disruption earlier in the day, but the paper also judged Paris's gamble on the weather had "backfired spectacularly".

A writer for the Guardian newspaper described the parade of boats on the Seine as "like watching an endless series of weirdly nationalistic office parties" but concluded Celine Dion had rescued the event with a "jaw dropping" performance.

ITALY

La Gazzetta dello Sport said the ceremony was "something unprecedented, even extraordinary. A great show or a long, tedious work, depending on your point of view and sensibility."

The mainstream Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera likened the show to a contemporary art performance, noting that "some (spectators) were bored, others were amused, many found the spectacle disappointing".

The left-leaning Italian daily La Repubblica said the ceremony overshadowed the athletes.

"A lot of France, a lot of Paris, very little Olympics.... a mirror that the immortal Paris turned on herself and discovered that she was so much, too much and soaking wet".