Hiam Abbass

Hiam Abbas is a Palestinian actress and film director. Abbass was born in Nazareth, Israel, to a Muslim Arab family. She was raised in the village of Deir Hanna. Since the late 1980s, she has lived in Paris and holds French citizenship.

Abbass is known for her roles in Red Satin (2002), Haifa (1996), Paradise Now (2005), The Syrian Bride (2004), Free Zone (2005), Dawn of the World (2008), The Visitor (2008), Lemon Tree (2008), Every Day is a Holiday (2009) and Amreeka (2009). In Spielberg's film, depicting the response to the Munich Massacre, she also served as a dialect and acting consultant.

She directed two short films, Le Pain (2001), and La Danse éternelle (2004). She portrays humanitarian Hind al-Husseini in Julian Schnabel's film Miral (2010), based on the life of Husseini and her orphanage.

In 2008, she played the mother of an illegal Syrian immigrant in Tom McCarthy's movie The Visitor, and the mother of an Iraqi soldier in Abbas Fahdel's film Dawn of the World.

Also in 2008, she played the principal role in Israeli director Eran Riklis's film Lemon Tree (Etz Limon in Hebrew). For this role, she won Best Performance by an Actress at the 2008 Asia Pacific Screen Awards. In Jim Jarmusch's 2009 film The Limits of Control, in the role of Driver, she recites in Classical Arabic one of the film's leitmotif-phrases, "He who thinks he is bigger than the rest must go to the cemetery. There he will see what life really is."

Abbass also appears in A Bottle in the Gaza Sea (2011), a French-Québecois-Israeli film produced by Thierry Binisti. It is based upon the young adult novel "Une bouteille dans la mer de Gaza" by Valérie Zenatti. She plays the role of Naïm's mother.

In 2012, she was named as a member of the Jury for the Main Competition at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. She made her directorial feature film debut with The Inheritance in 2012.

In 2017 she played Freysa, the head of the replicant freedom movement, in Blade Runner 2049.

Abbass has also acted in four TV shows: "The Promise" (2011), "The State" (2017), "Succession" (2018-present), and "Ramy" (2019-present).