Arab Film Festival: Alfilm – Guardians of Memory

Ms. Soualem, in your second documentary you dedicate yourself to the female line of your family: your mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and your aunts in Palestine. How did you come up with the idea of ​​portraying these women?

For me, this film was a continuation of my first film “Their Algeria”, which was about my paternal family, which comes from Algeria. On my mother’s side, too, I wanted to dedicate myself to passing on stories from generation to generation. As I rewatched the family videos my father recorded on VHS in the 1990s, I noticed the strong presence of women. My mother has nine siblings, including seven sisters. I realized how much I got from my grandmother and great-grandmother. It felt like everything I know about Palestine came from them. They were the guardians of the family memory. My mother also has a strong connection with them, even though she went abroad as a young woman. After I was born, she went to Palestine with me again and again. It was important to her that I was surrounded by these women.

Her mother Hiam Abbass is an internationally successful actress. What was it like for you to appear in a film directed by your daughter?

It was’nt easy. She usually acts in fictional films and expresses her feelings through other people’s stories. She’s not used to talking about herself. My film is about my mother as a woman and as a Palestinian, not as an actress. It took us some time to find a balance. It was difficult for me to approach her in my role as a director and not as a daughter. But we both understood that the whole thing goes beyond our own relationship. We are part of a larger story of memories and their transmission by women who have never spoken about themselves – and whose experiences have never been acknowledged.

Have you learned things about your mother that surprised you?

Yes, for example, I didn’t know that my mother wrote poetry when she was young. I also found poems that my grandfather wrote for my grandmother. All of this touched me very much. I realized that I am not the only one who wanted to capture our scattered and fragmented history. I continued something that others had already started. I was also very impressed that my mother always had a longing to find out more about her origins and want to overcome boundaries. She is very aware of her Palestinian identity and the historical-political situation of her people.

Your family’s poems are in Arabic, a language you speak fluently but do not write. When speaking to your mother, you switch between French and Arabic depending on the situation.

My mother and I communicate in two languages. I can’t read or write in Arabic and my mother learned French late in life so doesn’t have a complete command of the language. But that’s not a problem. Because these two languages ​​give rise to a third that enriches us. When you speak multiple languages, you have access to a greater diversity of ideas, perceptions, feelings, values, literary and cultural references.

To what extent did growing up with different cultures, languages ​​and historical narratives shape you as a filmmaker?

That’s what defines me as a person. For me, it is enriching to have access to different languages, cultures, realities, perceptions and life stories – including memories of struggles against colonialism, oppression, dehumanization, marginalization. This is a legacy that accompanies and guides me. However, because all of these stories are not anchored in official cultural memory, I feel it is an obligation to secure a place in historiography for my family and other migrants from Palestine and North Africa. Also to counter the stigmatization they face in the media. In public they are usually viewed in a negative light, which is miles away from reality. This is difficult to bear because everything we learned from them as children was positive. They were dispossessed, oppressed and humiliated. And yet they were able to raise their children in Europe and pass on to them love and values ​​such as forgiveness and respect.

Both of your films are about migration, exile and the loss of home. How do the Palestinian and Algerian perspectives on their own past differ?

It was important to me to tell the stories in people’s own words – in a language that corresponds to their feelings. My Algerian family survived through silence. It was a silence that expressed the suffering of being uprooted. I wanted to break this silence in my first film. My Palestinian family, on the other hand, survived by telling stories. Words enabled them not to be forgotten. The stories were fragmented, about dispossession, displacement and families being separated. It’s hard to tell it in a linear way because there were so many breaks.

How can you bring these together in a film?

With “Bye Bye Tiberias,” I tried to piece together our story from all these different experiences into a whole – as if I were reconstructing a puzzle so that we could all exist in one place, in one time. In the film you can create utopias and think about what it would have been like if my Algerian family hadn’t had to live through the colonial era or if my Palestinian family hadn’t been expelled from Tiberias in the 1948 war.

For me it is important to look at people in all their complexity and not just define them by what they have been through. I wanted to find ways for women to tell their individual stories, in all their complexity, through poetry, imagination and laughter. Because in this way they were passed on to us as children and grandchildren. Giving everyone space contributes to humanization. In this way, people are no longer perceived as a mass, but as individuals with their own desires.