Bye Bye Tiberias

At the age of 23, Hiam Abbass made the difficult decision to leave her grandmother, mother, and seven sisters in the Palestinian village of Deir Hanna to pursue acting in France. Thirty years later, her filmmaker daughter returns with her to journey through the vanished places among the scattered memories of four generations of daring Palestinian women. Home videos and pre-1948 stock footage are combined with a verité observation to capture the freewheeling rapport of Abbass with her sisters. What starts as a character study of a brave Palestinian woman becomes a thoughtful and moving portrait of a family torn apart by the Nakba. The result is a rich and intimate family saga about hope, grief, and loss, about undying family bonds, unchanged by distance and ideologies; about the cruelty of borders and the tattered state of the Arab world, and about the resilience of Palestinian people.