Bye Bye Tiberias
“Though it shares a perspective that’s sorely underrepresented in film, Bye Bye Tiberias stands too close to its subjects.”
Title: Bye Bye Tiberias (2023)
Director: Lina Soualem 👩🏽🇫🇷
Producer: Jean-Marie Nizan 👨🏼🇫🇷
Reviewed by Li 👩🏻🇺🇸
Technical: 2.5/5
Last night, Bye Bye Tiberias enjoyed its North American premiere at Toronto International Film Festival. The heartfelt documentary by Palestinian-Algerian French filmmaker Lina Soualem charts the tumultuous journey of her mother, actor Hiam Abbass (Succession, Ramy), who left the Palestinian village she grew up in to pursue a more expansive life. But it wasn’t just Deir Hanna that she escaped—she also left behind her mother, grandmother, and seven sisters.
Fast-forward 30 years: Soualem and her mother return to mourn Abbass’ recently deceased mother, Nemat. Widescreen present-day footage contrasts beautifully with the nostalgic home videos from 1992, shot in standard 4:3 ratio by Soualem’s father. The recurring faces across both timelines, overlaid with Soualem’s narration of how her mother grew up, creates a visual diary that feels deeply personal.
However, that sense of fierce ownership makes the overall documentary feel hesitant in scope. Viewers are enclosed in scenes of raking through belongings—old letters, heirloom jewelry, and empty spaces in innocuous rooms that Soualem and her family lavish with anecdotes. These rituals are easy to connect with; who hasn’t looked at old photographs and felt a magnetic sense of curiosity and longing? But this recounting of the past can quickly turn mundane, akin to an exciting dream that withers by the time it’s being passed on to bored listeners.
This isn’t to say that Soualem and her matrilineal ancestors have boring stories. Quite the opposite; their lives weave into a broader, and incredibly compelling, narrative of 20th and 21st century Israeli military aggression. Snippets of Bye Bye Tiberias get close to creating magic when family lore overlays with historical events, such as a tearful reunion in Syria between Abbass and her estranged aunt, Hosnieh, who was tragically separated from her family during Operation Hiram in 1948 and forced to start a new life on her own. But for the most part, Bye Bye Tiberias drops its stitches, too insular to properly connect with the bigger picture that would have made this film resonate more fully.
Gender: 5/5
Does it pass the Bechdel Test? YES
Created by a female filmmaker about the women in her family, Bye Bye Tiberias makes no bones about its quiet celebration and gratitude for womens’ strength. In particular, it follows four generations of women and examines the love and heartbreak that exists between mothers, daughters, grandmothers, and sisters. All the while, men are largely invisible, primarily discussed during anecdotes and oral histories. It’s a powerful tactic that leaves plenty of negative space for women to fill—an effective quelling of the male voice and male image, which all too often eclipse those of women on screen.
Race: 5/5
Soualem’s documentary puts a human lens on what can be soulless and cold headlines about the Israel-Palestine conflict. In Bye Bye Tiberias, we don’t just read a dry timeline of a war—we see what it means to the families and children on the ground, who fled and lost loved ones in the chaos that erupted when the Israel Defense Forces invaded Deir Hanna near Lake Tiberias.
Some of the film’s most powerful moments take place enmeshed in this brutal history. When Abbass describes her search for her aunt in Syria, the story is fantastically moving—two women running towards each other after decades spent forced apart. All the while, Soualem balances these war-torn stories of pain and grief with levity through footage of raucous weddings, dancing, and captured moments of cheeky humor—daughters gleefully teasing a mother about how much sex she must have had in order to bear ten children, as an example. The full picture Soualem paints is one that puts faces and names to wider, international conflicts that forget just who’s being harmed by violent acts of war.
Mediaversity Grade: B+ 4.17/5
Though it shares a perspective that’s sorely underrepresented in film, Bye Bye Tiberias stands too close to its subjects. Without that breathing room, there’s little space for viewers to invest themselves in Soualem’s story.
Like Bye Bye Tiberias? Try these other titles by directors exploring their own family histories.
The Fabelmans (2022)
The Fabulous Filipino Brothers (2021)
The Mattachine Family (2023)