Bye Bye Tiberias

One of the films in the annual Bristol Palestine Film Festival this year. Made by Lina Soualem (the little girl in picture above) about 4 generations of women in her family. She does a brilliant job of combining the personal and the historical. 
It starts in 1948 when her great grandmother and great grandfather are expelled from their home and farm in Tiberias. Two of the 700,000 in the expulsion  (the Nakba) to make way for the new state of Israel, which had been promised as a safe homeland for Jewish people. Her great grandfather loses his mind, wandering around saying ‘where is my farm, where are my cows, where is my donkey?’ And dies soon after. His wife brings up 8 children on her own, with her seamstress wages. So many stories, I’ll just mention a couple. Lina’s mother finds the life of the Palestinian village they fled to too claustrophobic and moves to Paris, becoming a film and TV actor. Her great aunt finds herself in a refugee camp in Syria, where she remains. She is not permitted to return to see her family for 30 years. Newsreel from 1948, and a mixture of family cine films and videos record many of the events, and the rest of the film is interviews with her mother and her mother’s sisters. I really recommend it if you can see it.  It’s terribly sad, it makes you feel very angry, but also it’s about the strength of people (women in this case) to adapt and make new lives in adverse circumstances.  There’s a lot of laughter in it, but also prepare to cry a lot.