A mother and daughter look at photographs of the past together. A complex family history is viewed in the Paris flat and they try to put it into some form of overview: women from 4 generations, their lives spanning Palestine and France.
Lina Soualem and her mother, the actress Hiam Abbass, take us on a journey through archive footage and the present: they visit their family and explore intergenerational relationships and experiences of loss. Hiam Abbass left her village of Deir Hanna in Galilee as a young woman to become an actress in Europe. Her poems, songs and stories along with memories of Lina Soualem, who recalls her childhood summers in Palestine, enrich this filmic narrative. Memories appear to be archived here primarily in people’s bodies, in their hands, faces or voices. We see archive footage of Lina’s great-grandmother slowly braiding her thin white hair into plaits and weaving them together. In the voice-over, Abbass quotes her: »They will bury my body with my life story, my prayers and my memories.«

What do the exile experiences of previous generations mean for your own personal biography? Lina Soualem explores the overlapping of the personal and the political. She interweaves vanished places, the pain of displacement and dispersed memories as well as her mother’s dreams and her thoughts on the Lake of Tiberias, whose stories are as fragmented as those of the women.