Lina Soualem on Going From Docs to Features With Drama ‘Alicante’

French-Palestinian-Algerian filmmaker Lina Soualem, whose documentary “Bye Bye Tiberias,” featuring her mother Hiam Abbas (“Succession”), launched positively from Venice and Toronto, is set to make her feature film debut with “Alicante,” a drama starring her sister Mouna Soualem (“Oussekine”) as a young woman on an existential journey that takes her to Spain.

After exploring her Algerian grandparents’ break-up in the doc “Their Algeria” and delving into how Hiam Abbas and her family were displaced from the city of Tiberias by the 1948 Arab-Israeli war in “Bye Bye Tiberias,” Soualem will now be putting a somewhat lighter tale on screen, albeit one that continues her exploration of “questions of belonging and transmission and exiles between generations” and “finding your place in the world,” as she puts it.

In “Alicante” Mouna Soualem will play Assia, a 32-year-old Franco-Algerian photographer, who has just broken up with her long-time American partner, with whom she had been living in New York City. 

After returning to Paris, where she was raised, she is hurting and starts to examine her desire to have a child. “To escape such existential questions, she decides to join her family in Spain, where her parents have recently invested in a restaurant in a popular seaside resort near the city of Alicante,” says the provided synopsis. “Arriving at the airport in Alicante, Assia has no idea what she’s in for,” the synopsis adds. “What was meant to be a family vacation turns into a rescue operation for a fragile business and a shaky family equilibrium.”

“Alicante,” which is currently in development, is being produced by Paris-based Easy Riders Films, which is run by Omar El Kadi and Nadia Turincev. The project is being unveiled to prospective partners at the Marrakech Film Festival’s Atlas Workshops, mentored by U.S. director Jeff Nichols.

In Marrakech, Lina Soualem spoke to…