Lina Soualem on Archiving Palestine

“Don’t open the gates to past sorrows,” Lina Soualem’s mother would tell her whenever she asked about her family history.

But that is exactly what Soualem attempts to do in her film Bye Bye Tiberias. The documentary shows four generations of Palestinian women silently going about safeguarding their story and legacy while enduring life-altering upheavals in their vanishing homeland.

“Women integrate the suffering, process it, and have the ability to reflect upon it and transmit it. Women endure the turbulences of history, fight to find their place, and also find strength to keep their legacy alive,” she says.

For Soualem, it thus became vital to not only tell the stories of the women “and their intimate path” but also for these memories to exist in a maternal form. “When the film was completed, these memories automatically became an archive, especially with the ongoing disappearance (of stories and people) in Palestine,” she explains.

Soualem’s moving documentary was also the Palestinian entry to the Oscars this year. In light of the unabated violence against Palestinians, from Gaza to Rafah, the award-winning film acquires renewed vigor and value. Referring to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine, Soualem says, “Of course, the amount of violence and the visuals are a shock. But the truth is this is a continuing story of displacement, erasing, looting, and killing.”

It’s from that despairing stream that the French-Palestinian-Algerian filmmaker extracts the stories of her great grandmother Um Ali, grandmother Nemat, mother Hiam Abbass, and great aunt Hosnieh – grappling with lost places and fractured memories amidst exile and dispossession. Thirty years after Soualem’s mother, Abbass (Succession, Blade Runner 2049, Ramy), had left her native Palestinian village to pursue her dream of becoming an actress in Europe, she returns to her village with her filmmaker daughter. There, she confronts baffling questions around the choices she made in the past.

Set between the past and the present, Bye Bye Tiberias pieces together visuals and conversations of today with home videos, archival footage, and reenactments to build an immersive socio-political-personal narrative.

“When I watched the footage that Dad had filmed in the ’90s, I noticed my great grandmother, grandmother, and seven aunts taking charge of everything (at home),” says Soualem of her matriarchs and aunts being the guardians of their legacy, keeping their history alive. “I knew that they maintained the culture, transmitted the values. [But] seeing them with an adult eye, I realized how precious these images were; especially in the context of a culture and a people that are silenced, unrecognized, and are perpetually on the verge of being erased.”

It was during the 1948 Nakba, when 700,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their homes in Palestine to establish the State of Israel that Soualem’s maternal family was forcibly displaced from their hometown, Tiberias. “Despite everything they went through, the women in my family never taught their children revenge or hatred. They have always been symbols of love and forgiveness, which is incredible,” she says.

In between our conversation at a chic coffee shop in downtown Doha, Soualem exchanges pleasantries with young filmmaking talents. As part of Qumra, Doha Film Institute’s annual talent incubator event, the youth are being mentored by modern legends such as Claire Denis, Jim Sheridan, and Leos Carax, and are drawing inspiration from storytellers like Soualem. Delighted over meeting several women documentary filmmakers from the region – Tunisia, Morocco, Palestine – Soualem points out how women often find themselves at vantage points to tell stories.

“Women are better placed to hold the history… Men are usually out in front, living everything, so it’s much harder for men to do that,” she says.

In the film, Soualem’s conversations with her maternal elders unravel stories buried under the rubble of time and conflict. At its heart, the film upholds archiving as both an act of political resistance and a means to preserve their heritage. “These images are my memory’s treasure. I don’t want them to fade,” Soualem says in the film.

Much like the scene in which she takes a dip in the lake of their village Deir Hanna, just as she would do as a baby, the Paris-born and raised Soualem refers to being “immersed” in her mother’s culture. “She would often take me to her maternal family. She would only talk in Arabic with me, sharing food, culture, and songs. I would visit her on the sets of many Arab films that she was working on and in different countries. So I have been very close to this culture and family,” Soualem says.

Far removed from the warmth of her Arab culture, Soualem’s journey as a filmmaker often encountered existential obstacles in Europe. “In France, I didn’t feel like I was allowed to live my multiple identities – Muslim, Algerian, Palestinian. I was always asked to choose. I would always be told: Oh, but you are not Palestinian, you are French. You are not this or that. As if I couldn’t be all of these things at the same time."

Such constant battering made Soualem conscious of how she asserted her layered identities, always ensuring it didn’t upset people. She likens this obligation of providing tailored responses to carving out pieces of herself. “I always felt uneasy with this binary view of identity. These films allow me to refuse this binary view and stigmatization. They allow me to say we are all complex beings with identities and not only ethnicity, but also gender and the paths you choose.”

What also inspired Soualem to strain against being put in a box was her mother Abbass’ audacious pursuit of acting against all odds. “My mother radiated to me this sense of being able to choose for yourself and to be able to live this complexity without regret.”

A student of history and political science from Paris’ La Sorbonne University, Soualem always harbored journalistic aspirations. Having uncovered “a sensitivity and a subjectivity” that she wanted to express, she understood that she wasn’t cut out for journalism. “In journalism, you are supposed to be objective – which, frankly, doesn’t mean much today,” she points out, referring to how the genocide of Palestinians is neglected or wilfully misreported by most of Western media. “I wanted to find a medium of expression that allowed me to deeply reflect and express my emotions. It’s also a path to find my place, to have a voice when we feel silenced.”

That freedom seeped into Soualem’s approach to work and the film reaps rich rewards from this authenticity. Instead of controlling the narrative through scripts and guidelines, Soualem allowed the women’s memories, emotions, and candidness to shine through. “It was important to respect the authenticity of the women of my family, and their right to poetry as well to exist in their full imagination,” she explains. “I didn’t want to impose any feeling upon them. I respected their intimate paths and what they went through. I chose to not project anything on them but to let them exist in their individuality, complexity, contradictions, strengths and vulnerabilities.”

This maternal side of story poses a stark contrast to her first feature documentary, Their Algeria, which shows the story of her Algerian paternal grandparents deciding to separate after 62 years of living together in France. “That was really a story of silence shaped by colonial trauma and the family’s immigration. Algerians in France were silent about what had happened so as to protect themselves from the hardships and to be able to continue,” Soualem says, reasoning the contradictory compulsions of the two displacement stories. “Whereas my maternal family, in order to survive, had to keep telling their story and allow it to exist so that they don’t slip into oblivion.”

Throughout the film, Soualem touches upon a vast emotional spectrum of Palestinian existence; that which resonates from festive celebration to deathly silence. The rehumanising of the Palestinian identity is in itself the deep cleansing of the dehumanising trope that the West has often relayed.

Soualem refuses to be perceived “through the eyes of others” and “the cliches” heaped upon her people. “We are used to seeing Palestinian stories only through the prism of death or war. People are interested in Palestinians only when there are killings. What about the rest of the time when they are living and surviving? The miracle is, despite all of that, Palestinians keep celebrating culture, weddings, organising festivals, making films, writing books, doing poetry,” she says.

“It’s as if we are not allowed to be perceived through life, but only through death,” Soualem says. “I wanted to focus on life, and culture is life. I wanted to allow these characters to exist as what I knew them for.”