Lina Soualem

Lina Soualem (France, 1990) is a film director and actress born in Paris to an Algerian father and a Palestinian mother. After studying history and political science at La Sorbonne, Lina worked as a programmer for the Buenos Aires International Human Rights Film Festival. She has directed two feature-length documentaries, Leur Algérie (2020) and Bye Bye Tibériade (2023), selected at Visions du Réel, Venice, Toronto… and works as an author on fiction, documentary and series projects. Bye Bye Tibériade was chosen to represent Palestine at the 2024 Oscars and was nominated in the best documentary category at the 2025 Césars.

After nearly seven years writing and directing creative documentaries, Lina Soualem is now looking to explore a freer approach and a freer cinematographic language. Her residency project is devoted to writing a fiction film, entitled Alicante. Alicante is like a piece of life. A small part of the story of Assia, a young Franco-Algerian woman in her thirties, who, after a break-up, joins her family who have just opened a restaurant in Spain. A family vacation that turns into a rescue operation for a shaky restaurant business…