‘Legacies’ star Hiam Abbass: ‘Before the series I was almost against television’ | Web series

“It was the first TV show I ever did,” Abbass told Hindustan Times at the just-concluded Ajyal Film Festival in Doha, Qatar. “Before Legacies, I was almost anti-television,” adds the Palestinian actor, born in Nazareth, Israel.

“I just liked cinema and the work of an actor on stage, as well as the interaction with films where you know the beginning and the end. The series was a new experience for me, where you’re just like, “Go,” and you don’t understand. I don’t know where you’re going. So it was an interesting learning process,” she says.

“I really enjoyed working on the show. I loved the cast, the writers and the directors. I think it was one of the most important projects I’ve had on television,” recalls Abbass, who appeared in all four seasons of Legacies. which ended last year after a hugely successful international run for half a century as the lead and recurring character.

Palestinian voice

Arguably the most successful Palestinian actor, Abbass has played a variety of roles representing Palestinian identity and telling the stories of people who become refugees in their own land.

She was the Palestinian widow who sued the Israeli defense minister for uprooting her lemon trees in Israeli director Eran Riklis’s The Lemon Tree (2008), played Palestinian activist Hind al-Husseini, who founded the Arab Orphanage orphanage in Jerusalem, in the 2010 film by American artist Julian Schnabel. film Miral, in one of the main roles Freida Pinto, and a tailor in love with a Gaza fisherman in the Tarzan brothers’ Gaza Mon Amour (2020), which explores romance under occupation.

Abbass also visited the American director. Steven SpielbergMunich, about the hunt for the terrorists who killed Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, Palestinian director Hani Abu-Assad’s Oscar-nominated film Heaven Now, French-Canadian director Dennis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 and the American TV series Rami” about Muslim immigrants to the United States led by stand-up comedian Rami Yusef.

Last year, Abbass played herself in her daughter Lina Soalem’s debut documentary film, “Farewell Tiberias,” which tells the personal stories of four generations of Palestinian women tracing ties to their homeland.

“I am very pleased with Bye Bye Tiberias. Honestly, I was very afraid, because when you reveal personal things in your life and go so deep into not only yourself, but also into the people who sort of made you and are close to you, people who are so deeply connected to your past, that it’s hard to be stoic in the face of it, you know,” Abbass says of the story of his grandmother, mother, himself and daughter.

Behind the camera

Abbass stepped behind the camera in 2012 to make her first directorial film, “The Inheritance,” the story of a wedding at the height of the war between Israel and Lebanon. More than a decade later, as the Middle East endures a catastrophic conflict that has killed 44,000 people in Gaza and displaced more than three million people in Gaza and Lebanon, Abbass recognizes the power of the collective voice of Palestinian artists.

“You know, I’m not an ambassador, but I think the most important thing is how the voice that I perceive, and our voices taken together, will make up the Palestinian voice,” she says. “Through cinema and through our work, at least we were able to raise them again, and just say: you know, we exist, but we exist not as you want us to be, but as our own voices, individually, and we can represent what we are trying to represent.”

Abbass, who lives in Paris, has five films in various stages of production, most of which continue to present Palestinian stories to the world. “Over the past year, I have made four films that will be released in 2025-2026. I’m filming two new films early next year. One of them is a Lebanese film with Lebanese-French director Danielle Arbid. (from Alone with the War) and another with Argentine writer and director Santiago Amigorena.”

“Another film (“Everything is in front of you”) by Palestinian director Annemarie Jassir (“Salt of this Sea”). My heroine is an old woman participating in the resistance to the Palestinian revolution. In this film I live with my husband, my daughter and her daughter. So there’s also a bit of a guest role going on in the film because of my relationship with Annemarie,” says Abbass, referring to the acclaimed director’s new project. farmers’ revolt against the British in Palestine in 1936.

Her new acting roles do not allow Abbas to direct. “Unfortunately, since I directed The Inheritance, I haven’t had time to develop another one. I directed a short film, Le Donne della Vucciria, for Prada Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales series. Prada has decided to encourage female directors to appear more often on the market. I was number six in the series. I also directed one of the episodes of Ramy. I love it, I would still like to do it, but I don’t find the time to develop it. It requires your full time.”

Don’t ignore the memory

Abbass entered filmmaking as a production assistant on a film shot in her own village in Nazareth. “(Palestinian director) Michel Khleifi reached out to everyone in the arts for help, because we didn’t really have any production companies or production houses,” she says, referring to Khleifi’s debut film A Wedding in the Galilee ( 1997).

“And I remember one time he asked me to do this little silhouette piece. This is where I discovered the connection with the camera. I think it was one of the secret reasons deep inside me that made me leave Palestine to look for something else to, you know, meet this world one day.”

“The love for acting was in me from a young age. But my relationship with cinema actually happened, I think, almost like a dream. One day a film appeared in the central square of my open-air house. village, and I remember being a very, very young man. I took a small chair from my parents’ house, put it there and sat on it and looked at something that seemed magical to me.”

As for magic, will it be involved in the new Harry Potter series announced by HBO, helmed by Legacies producers Francesca Gardiner and Mark Mylod? “No, no, no. You see, they didn’t tell me this, I only found out about it now from you. I don’t follow it in that sense and I don’t stalk people to be like, “Hey, what are you doing next? Can I do something to you? I’m not that kind of actor. I don’t judge others, but I work so hard that I’m really happy with everything that comes to me. I am lazy and just sit and wait, but I have a deep conviction that whatever is meant for me will come to me.”

Abbass’ decision to star in her daughter’s debut documentary, “Farewell Tiberias,” was cathartic. “It was painful to talk about the past because it was close to all the pain I went through with this separation (her mother’s death). Separation reminds you of another, and another, and another, and it is deeply rooted in the heritage that you received from all these exiles one after another, and this was handed to you, despite the fact that you wanted to receive it.

“But what I also think is really interesting today is that I would sum up this whole experience by saying that I’ve discovered how important it is for people to be aware of their own stories and how important it is to always know that you are part of a collective, and that collective, it cannot be ignored. History, memory, may be personal at first, but you are part of the collective memory, and we must always adhere to the idea that we are part of the house. We are not alone in this world.”