by Helen Barlow
The 46th Cairo International Film Festival (CIFF) has honoured Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass with the Golden Pyramid Award for her incredible lifetime achievements. One of the most compelling forces in Arab and international cinema and television, the long-time Paris resident is about to turn 65 and is still going strong. While she started out in Palestinian cinema and appeared in Hany Abu-Assad’s Oscar-nominated 2005 film, Paradise Now, she has regularly acted in English-language productions including Munich (2005) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017), though gained particular prominence for her portrayal as Logan Roy’s strong-willed wife, Marcia in the HBO series Succession, for which she was nominated for an Emmy.
The big surprise in our CIFF interview is that among her many upcoming projects is a feature to be shot in Australia, and while she is unable to discuss it, she does mention her character in the context of the women she portrays. “It always has to do with a specific female identity that I want to hold and bring to the audience. I want that character to exist in history forever.”
Have you been to Australia before? “In 2008 I won the best actress prize for Lemon Tree at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards, but I didn’t go to receive the award because I wasn’t free. They invited me the following year to be on the jury, and they did another ceremony to give me the award, which was really nice.”
With her ex-husband, Algerian-French actor Zinedine Soualem, Abbass has two daughters, Lina and Mouna Soualem, who both appeared in their mother’s directing debut, 2012’s Inheritance.
Mouna is now a successful actress, while Lina is an up-and-coming director. With Lina’s award-winning 2023 documentary, Bye Bye Tiberius [below], she traced the lineage of her maternal Palestinian family which is more marked by women. To shoot the film she returned with her mother to the Palestinian village of Deir Hanna where Abbass grew up.
Lina was also in Cairo for a pitching session for her first dramatic feature and she told me about the film. “It follows a French-Algerian family who leave France and move to Spain to open a restaurant and the daughter joins her parents for the summer. It’s about a family so there’s a lot of laughter, but also a lot of family drama.”
You recently appeared with Jeremy Irons in Palestine 36 which just won the best film prize at the Tokyo Film Festival and is being put forward for a Best International Film Oscar. Directed by Annemarie Jacir, who like yourself was born in Palestine, the film recounts the 1936–1939 Arab revolt against British colonial rule. How important is it for you that people are reminded of what happened in Palestine’s history?
“It’s really important for me as it’s important for the history of Palestine, because we are living in times where I don’t know what forces, or bigger forces, are trying to dismiss the existence of certain communities, of certain people. It’s unacceptable to think that there was no history to Palestine, that there was no such a place as Palestine. It was important to get into the history and present the bigger image of what happened to understand it better.”
Was it important not to blame the protestors, but to blame the British for what they have done?
“I think the British should blame themselves for what they have done. But I’m not really into the kind of cinema that blames people or blames communities or blames bigger powers or whatever. I’m more for a cinema that traces the facts and tells you the history. Then it’s up to the audience to decide. We know that the British weren’t very innocent, like the French and other European powers that just went and colonized so many countries. They tried to erase the culture of these people and tried to make them servants to themselves and their power. So today, I think we are in a time when you cannot be silent about these things. I think the history and the past has to come up at one stage, at least for the younger generation to understand the heritage and trauma they inherited from their parents or grandparents or their communities. It needs to be discussed, because somehow a resilience in life is about knowing what your past was, in order to accept and to make life better for the future. I think this is what we should be aiming for. Now we’re talking politics or society or whatever, philosophical things, but I think the only thing I can think about when I say this is that they’re the movies that I try to be part of. For me, they’re very important in that sense, because they are there to give a kind of service to humanity. So, for me art is not there to be just art, it’s to be in the service of something that belongs to us. Humanity with a big H.”
You play lots of different nationalities and continue to do so in upcoming films. You’re an outrageous Algerian in La Petite Cuisine de Mehdi and you also have Love Conquers All, where you play a Lebanese woman who falls in love with a much younger undocumented Sudanese immigrant. The story is reminiscent of Fassbinder’s 1974 masterpiece Fear Eats the Soul. So, you play Lebanese, Algerian, Palestinian and French, but not real French.
“Yes, French from an origin. Unfortunately, if you’re not born in the country, they don’t consider you as French, but from this background or that background, even though you’ve been there so many years. I’ve been in France for 37 years, and it’s amazing that you’re still in that category. I think I will be all my life. This is something that I think foreigners always suffer from, even if my immigration was a totally different story. I think about all these immigrants who come by force to start a new life, and they live with a new nationality and a new language. So, I ask myself, when are we going to allow them to be part of the common view? These are big questions. Maybe we should ask politicians about it.”
You are one of the most recognisable names from the Arab region. Do you feel a sense of responsibility to guide or mentor?
“I do, but not because I am successful. I feel that it’s our responsibility to take care of the younger generation, not to dictate to them what they have to do or say, but just to help them find their path.”
Is it also because of your daughters?
“I think my daughters are just my continuity really, because when we talk about motherhood, the transition starts basically at home from the parent to the kid. I’m the mother who transmitted things to my daughters. I didn’t know that they would be in the business, but I transmitted to them the love of whatever they wanted to do and to go with it. And they did, which is great. A lot of people ask me if I’m happy that my daughters are pursuing the hardest jobs on earth. But you know, a lot of things are hard in life. They will get there, hard or not. I got there and it was very hard too. For those who believe that acting is just like, ‘I wake up and I’m an actor’, they’re completely wrong. It’s the same for filmmakers. There is a personal education, so you look every day at what is happening around you. There is a responsibility to deal with things that are happening in the world, to bring questions to be questioned. Sometimes we get answers and are able to register things in the collective memory. But today, it’s very easy to erase collective memory from history.”
Do you favour arthouse or Hollywood cinema? Has it become more difficult to find roles as you’ve grown older?
“I’ve never belonged to one cinema or another, I just do cinema, that’s it, full stop. Cinema for me is a universal language that I do whenever the language of the movie or the language of the project talks my own language. So, I follow up projects because I’m interested in defending something. I think my first big part was offered to me at the age of 40, a movie that got me known to the world. And ever since, I’ve been working. And thank God I keep working. I don’t think that now – I am 65 – that anything is rushing towards me, but I’ll keep working as long as I get offered jobs. And I’m really very thankful to those who love to work with me.”
Did Succession help you get more offers? What nationality did you play there?
“We never really said what it was. Shiv at one stage says that she found things about Marcia being this rich Arab, married to an Arab. We think she’s Lebanese, but we never really went there. I liked it that way. Who cares whether I’m Lebanese, Palestinian, Saudi or whatever?”
Marcia had an agenda, and she was going to get the money out of them no matter what.
“Yes exactly. And yes, Succession helped me get more offers, but every project that I did helped. The series Ramy, helped in many ways. Succession maybe helped more with the studios, more with the people who would never see my work otherwise, just suddenly saw me. They connected the pieces with something in the past that I’d done, so they went ‘Oh, she’s maybe the one’.”
In Ramy (played by Ramy Youssef, who was nominated for two Emmys) you played his mother.
“Ramy was Hulu. It was American, but Ramy is American from an Egyptian background. He’s what we call an Arab American, Muslim American.”
How does it feel getting a lifetime achievement award here in Cairo?
“Honestly, it’s great. The first time I was asked for this was at the Carthage Film Festival in Tunisia. I was still young and when I went on stage I thought, why am I getting this award? I just didn’t believe that I deserved it. It’s such a rewarding acknowledgement from people who are involved in cinema recognising your work and saying, ‘We love you, we love what you do’. So, you receive it in such a generous way. So, does it make me reflect about my career? Specifically, it doesn’t make me feel that I got wherever I had to be. I don’t know why, where I will be. I know the path is long, so it encourages me to go further.”
Does it mean more coming from a festival in the Arab world than it would from somewhere else, like in the US or France?
“Honestly, it’s the same, but coming from Cairo is very special, because Cairo is one of the most ancient Arab festivals. They’ve been trying for a few years to give it to me here, but I was never able to come. This year, I thought I had to go, and I wasn’t working so I squeezed it into my schedule, and I’m very happy to have done it, because from Cairo, it means a lot. When I was younger, Egyptian cinema helped me open my eyes to this art, because it was the only thing I could discover, like the Friday evening Egyptian movie. It helped me reaIise that I could do things in movies, whether I knew then that I would be an actress or not. The circle of life is very interesting in that sense, because you don’t calculate. You go serenely with whatever you think your vocation is and you build it one day after the other, and you keep going really, because it’s important to keep going.”
