The 10th edition of Qumra started in Doha on March 1, with filmmakers and industry people from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and beyond coming together to exchange ideas and benefit from the mentoring program offered by the Doha Film Institute. The first film screening of this year’s Qumra was "Bye Bye Tiberias" by Lina Soualem, an alumnus of the workshops, about the Palestinian side of her family.

Soualem’s first documentary "Their Algeria" (2020) was about her Algerian, paternal grandparents, and their changing relationship through the decades. This time, Soualem introduces us to her mother’s family, who are from Tiberias and who had to leave their homes in 1948, when Israel occupied much of Palestine's territory.

The film opens with a home video of Lina and her mother, Hiam Abbas, bathing in Lake Tiberias as she contemplates, in voice-over, being immersed in that lake and so in the memories of the women in her family.

The film centers around Hiam Abbas, who has an arresting screen presence in anything she is in. We can all agree that her character Marcia in the series "Succession" should have inherited the Waystar Royco Empire. For someone like me who is obsessed with the series, one moment in "Bye Bye Tiberias" feels like a "making of" for "Succession."

Hiam Abbas is face timing her mother in Palestine, asking her to visit. Abbas says she is busy with work, and I somehow feel implicated because I am one of the million fans that need their "Succession" fix, so Hiam must delay her visit to her mother for a while longer. Abbas’ relationship with her mother is one of the pivots of the documentary.

As her daughter, Soualem, gently guides Abbas to assess her past, whether her mother may have truly forgiven Abbas for leaving her family to seek a life in Europe is the one question that haunts her and brings her to tears.

As with all documentaries with a Palestinian setting, "Bye Bye Tiberias" is about the distances between loved ones imposed by political and personal circumstances. Soualem relies much on her father’s home videos from the '90s when the family would spend their summer holidays in Palestine.

As she says in the voice-over and even more explicitly in the Q&A afterward, the film is her way of writing herself into the line of the incredible women who have continued to live, work, and raise families in Palestine through destruction and displacement.

One of the most powerful moments in the Q&A came when Soualem said that through making the film, she realized that her mother had not become who she is because she had left Palestine, but that she is now what she is because of the strong female figures she had when in Palestine.

One of these women is Hiam Abbas’s great aunt, who, when she visits Palestine after decades of separation because she was displaced to Syria in '48, says that she is sure that Hiam will come and find her in her refugee camp/neighborhood in Syria.

This, of course, is an unthinkable task for the Hiam of those years, but she does manage to do it in the end, the seed of this idea and the trust that she can do it having been planted in her by another strong Palestinian woman. The way Hiam Abbas relates the scene of their meeting is quite something to behold and I won’t describe it so you can feel its full force when you watch it yourself.

The archival material that Soualem uses, of civilians evacuating homes, Israeli soldiers pulling down buildings and laughing at the Palestinians from the jeeps, shows Israel’s settler colonial methods have not changed from day one.

When asked whether it was difficult to gather this material, Soualem answered yes, emphasizing that no national Palestinian archive exists for images. She explained that she was looking particularly for the faces of women in the films to stand in for the women in her family who had to face displacement, particularly this great aunt.

As it is a documentary about family trees, everyone will have different things to relate to separations, jealousies and feuds from their own family. One scene that struck me in particular because of my own family history is when Hiam Abbas takes her mother to see Tiberias, which is now an Israeli "resort." In the middle of a square stands the abandoned mosque, which we have already seen in the black-and-white archival footage Soualem has used in her film.

The mosque is abandoned, cordoned off by iron railings, with plants and trees growing out of it. The architecture and its still central place in the square reminded me of the mosque in Athens, much better kept but closed to worshippers, something from a different time than the new nation-state surrounding it.

Having already shared this bit of her family history with us and connecting it to the history of Palestine, Soualem was also very gracious in answering the questions coming from the audience, especially one that suggested that her film treated the dispersals in her family as more or less voluntary, that she did not emphasize Israel’s violence quite enough.

To that comment, Soualem’s answer was that she was interested in the spaces where the personal and collective meet, that this was the one story that was hers to tell, and that she had not set out to make a documentary about the nakba.

She said she hoped more individual stories would come out and Palestine’s story would have been told collectively. She ended by saying that given the destruction in Gaza, telling these stories, especially on film, becomes even more important because when people are gone, there is a chance that the movie will stay. The memories of these places will not be erased entirely.