Although all the attention (and the awards) have gone to Brian Cox, Jeremy Strong, Sarah Snook and Kieran Culkin, who were seduced by the impeccable scripts and the fascinating production of Succession, they also felt the presence of Hiam Abbass, the actress Palestinian who played Marcia, Roy’s wife there.
Presented in the first episodes as an enigmatic figure and apparently much kinder to the world than the rest of the characters, after having disappeared from the scene for a time on a supposed trip to Europe, Marcia returned in the last episodes of the series. HBO that concluded this year with a change of attitude, becoming the undisputed heir.
A good example of the range possessed by this 63-year-old actress who works all over the world and in multiple languages ??but who in the 1980s established her residence in Paris is her participation in another series, Ramy, where she plays the mother. from Golden Globe winner Ramy Youssef, an extroverted woman who speaks her mind, gets in where she shouldn’t and who couldn’t be more different from Marcia.
Owner of a career in front of and behind the cameras that includes having advised Steven Spielberg during the filming of Munich, in which she also participated as an actress, and having done the same with Alejandro González Iñarritu in Babel, Abbas has also directed a feature film, Inheritance, which she shot in Israel and presented at the Venice Film Festival in 2012. There she starred alongside the two daughters she had with the French actor of Algerian origin Zinedine Soualem, Lina and Mouna. And while she’s never reached big-star status, Hiam has distinguished herself with solid performances in Blade Runner 2049, The Visitor, and the memorable The Syrian Bride.
Nominated for the first time this year for an Emmy for her work in Succession, Abbas has also made headlines for the presentation at the Venice and Toronto festivals of a documentary that reveals more about her than she would have wanted to share with her fans.
The film, Bye Bye Tiberias, tells the story of his own emigration in his early 20s, first to England and then to France, with footage of a recent return to the Palestinian village where he grew up, Deir Hanna. Accompanied by his daughter Lina, who is also the director and narrator, Bye Bye Tiberias shows us Hiam in his intimacy, reconstructing through performances in which his sisters participate, poems and old letters the moment in which at 23 years she decided to confront ancestral tradition and choose to marry a British professor converted to Islam.
Shortly after, she went to London with him, a fact that generated a rift with her parents, something that did not change when some time later she informed them that she had divorced. We also relived with her the key moment when, at a very young age, she chose to go to study photography in Haifa, instead of following the career that her family imagined for her, that of a doctor or a lawyer.
A visit to the Palestinian national theater El-Akawati, where he reunites with a former colleague who today directs him, allows us to learn about his early beginnings in the profession, when the group that was based in East Jerusalem had constant conflicts with the Israeli authorities.
Equally important in the film is the reconstruction of family history, which allows us to understand a little more about the eternal conflict that confronts Palestinians and Jews, and which could not be more current today. His grandparents lived in Tiberias, a city located in front of the lake of the same name, until 1948 when they were forced to leave there by the British authorities who displaced some 700,000 Palestinians. While on the screen you can see heartbreaking images of the war that surrounded the birth of the state of Israel, Haim narrates in French the trip of his maternal grandparents to the border with Syria where a daughter was already there, and a sudden change of plans that took them to the village located just 30 kilometers from Tiberias. According to the story, Hasni, the actress’s grandfather, died of sadness, and her grandmother Um Ali was left in charge of eight children, whom she had to support with what she earned with her sewing machine.
Videos from a visit in 1992 when Lina was four years old show how Hiam’s relationships with his parents changed for the better when the grandchildren arrived. The film is also a tender memory of those who are no longer here: Nemat, his teacher mother, who is seen in her final years in a wheelchair, and his aunt Hosnieh, who stayed to live in Syria in 1948 in a refugee camp and was only able to return once.