Farewell Tiberias: Fighting Palestinian Destruction through an Act of Remembrance

Goodbye Tiberias opens with grainy VHS footage of a woman and her child swimming in the waters of Lake Tiberias on the western shore of the Sea of ​​Galilee.

Franco–Palestinian–Algerian director Lina Sualem narrates: “As a child, my mother took me to swim in this lake, as if swimming in her history.”

This cinematic memoir attempts to tell that story by piecing together memories of her scattered family Israeli class.

The story is captured by the lake where they lived before Nakba in 1948, when Israel forced 700,000 Palestinians from their homes.

These days, Hiam Abbass (widely known in the West for her role as Marcia Roy in Continuity) visits the lake again with his mother Nemeth. They discover that its banks are surrounded by barriers and filled with shops adorned with neon signs in Hebrew. They try to reflect in silence, but are interrupted by the blaring pop music and the approach of Israeli soldiers.

The film follows Abbass, who leaves the village of Deir Hanna at the age of 23 to pursue an acting career in France, and returns to her home to care for the ailing Nemeth.

Sualem chronicles the history of Palestinian displacement through the stories of four generations of women in her family, of whom she is the fourth.

They include her great-grandmother Um Ali, who fled Tiberias in 1948 with her husband and eight children; her great-aunt Hosni, who found refuge in Syria after being exiled; and her mother Khiam, who left Palestine for Europe when she was 20 years old.

Thousand Yard Stare

Goodbye Tiberias tries to weave her stories together using a mixture of ’90s home videos, archival footage, family photos, poetry and contemporary interviews with Abbass and her sisters.

A recurring motif throughout the film is Sualem and her mother arranging photographs on the wall of her grandmother’s apartment, forming a patchy map of their family’s history.

Video footage from Sualem’s annual childhood visits to Deir Hanna often shows the four women together, but the focus constantly shifts from one woman to another – from young Sualem absorbed in a game to Um Ali thoughtfully braiding her gray hair.

In a collection of home videos, photographs and interviews with her daughter, Abbass appears distant. She often looks away from the camera, her eyes flickering into the distance.

She has the same thousand-yard stare in her teen photo. Footage of her second wedding shows Abbass staring into space among beaming guests.

Abbas’s desire to escape home, expressed in the poems she wrote at night as a teenager and which she reads on camera, is accompanied by a strong desire to return there.

Aware of her mother’s discomfort, Sualem suggested alternative ways of depicting the past by having Abbas re-enact conversations with her father, sister, and former colleague at the Palestinian National Theater.

When Sualem convinces his mother to turn to the camera, Abbass snaps, “What do you want, Lina?”

Abbas’s desire to escape home, expressed in the poems she wrote at night as a teenager and which she recited on camera, is accompanied by a strong desire to return there.

The paradox is touchingly contained in her description of her reunion with Aunt Hosni. Abbass’s French passport allowed her to cross the border that separated the family in 1948, preventing Hosni from returning. Abbass describes how they were drawn to each other “like magnets.”

“Don’t leave me”

In one of the scenes she stands on the balcony, turns in place and points towards the sea: Lebanon, Syria And Jordan.

“And here we are in the middle,” she concludes.

Her sense of “in-between” reflects the state of Palestine itself.

In a WhatsApp conversation with Abbas, her mother Nemeth pleads: “Don’t leave me.”

This is the last time we see her before she dies.

Although the Israeli occupation does not feature prominently in the film’s frames, it creates a constant background noise. The roar of an airplane flying overhead or the khaki-clad soldiers marching past Abbas on the shores of Lake Tiberias interrupt their efforts to preserve a tangible trace of their memories.

Its violence is felt in the disparate stories of four generations of women, which Sualem lovingly tries to piece together.

Sualem notes that even her knowledge of Arabic is a “fragment” of her mother’s language.

This film is an attempt to counteract this violence and counteract the destruction of Palestinians by preserving and transmitting memory.

“What if the remains of this place disappear?” Sualem reflects at the end of the film.

As we witness erasure Gazawhere more than 40,000 people were killed by Israeli forces and more than half the buildings were leveled, the question became even more urgent, and the act of remembering a more current form of resistance became even more urgent.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.