Ananya Singh
October 25, 2026
“These photos are the treasure of my memory; I don’t want them to fade away.”
- Lina Soualem, Bye Bye Tiberias (2023)
How do you reconcile with a place that was lost long before you were even born? Grief seems like the wrong word to describe that feeling, or perhaps too small a one. It stings to mourn a place that you never knew. The difficulty is not just living with the absence but trying to keep that place alive.
Lina Soualem, a filmmaker, journalist and actress, describes herself as “born of departure” as the daughter of a Palestinian mother and an Algerian father born in France. Soualem's “Bye Bye Tiberias” grows out of these questions and inheritance, tracing the lives of four generations of Palestinian women.
The documentary opens with old footage of Soualem swimming with her mother in Lake Tiberias. I keep returning to this one line: Soualem recalls that her mother took her there “as if to bathe me in her story.” Is this how belonging is passed on when places we belong to have been lost?
Soualem returns repeatedly to this problem through photographs and footages. In one particularly moving scene, she and her mother try to arrange and paste old photographs onto a wall. The act of assembling these images resembles an attempt to make history visible. In this sense, “Bye Bye Tiberias” participates in a much longer tradition within Palestinian cinema, where the absence, not just of loss of homeland but also of an ordinary life, itself becomes a way of presenting belonging. A larger part of the film is carried by what is not said; rather what we gather from unspoken glances. For example, the reunion between Hiam Abbass, Palestinian actress and Soualem’s mother, and her aunt Hosnieh. When she finally holds her, she clings and cries for the “scent of family.”
Due to the lack of archives, keeping a personal image is very much political. As Nurith Gerz and George Khleifi argue in ‘Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, trauma and memory’, Palestinian cinema grapples with the trauma of displacement by attempting to reconstruct a historical continuity between past, present and future. The past remains simultaneously absent and present, not replacing contemporary reality but shaping how it is perceived. Yet this cinematic memory is also caught between two impulses: the idealisation of a lost, often idyllic homeland and the persistent re-enactment of exile and deportation as though these events were still unfolding. Which of these forms of remembrance takes precedence, they suggest, depends largely on the historical circumstances shaping Palestinian experience.
There are multiple ways in which the question of belonging can be answered. In this sense it reminded me of Jocelyne Saab’s “Beirut, My City.” There is a brief moment in Saab’s film that discusses the dichotomy of war creating a new kind of space: one that is filled with memory, not just of what remains but also of what used to exist there. The old city and the wounded city exist together. The same space carries both these realities. One of the most devastating moments in the film comes when Abbas talks about her grandfather, Hosni. A farmer, he lost his land in the Nakba and tried to go back, only to find out that it was gone. He would sit by the road asking passing strangers, “Have you seen my donkeys? Have you seen my cows?” He eventually lost his mind and died of grief.
This is particularly important because displacement cannot be understood as a singular event when it is an ongoing condition. In “The Nakba Projected: Recent Palestinian Cinema,” Breseeth argues that the Nakba cannot be understood as a historical catastrophe confined to the past as its trauma continues to shape Palestinian life in the present, while the losses it produced remain central to the ongoing struggle against Israeli occupation and oppression.
Since displacement is more of a condition, memory cannot just be a way of looking at the past. It has to be something people do in the present because the loss is still unfolding. While a place that has been lost likely never returns, it can continue; in a mother’s tale and a daughter’s film.
Photo Source: American National Red Cross Collection (Library of Congress)