The European Film Academy will present Hiam Abbass with its European Achievement in World Cinema Award, honoring a career of nearly four decades. The Palestinian actress will receive the honor “for her astounding body of work” at the 39th European Film Awards in Athens. The ceremony takes place January 16, 2027, with Abbass attending as honorary guest.
Abbass took her first leading role in 1989, in Ariane Mnouchkine’s La Nuit Miraculeuse, and has appeared in over 100 Palestinian, Arab and international productions since. Her credits include Satin Rouge, Paradise Now, The Visitor and Blade Runner 2049. North American viewers know her from Hulu’s Ramy and as Marcia Roy, wife of Logan Roy, in HBO’s Succession.
The Academy has recognized her work before. She earned two European Film Award nominations, both for films by Israeli director Eran Riklis: a People’s Choice nomination in 2005 for The Syrian Bride, and a European Actress nomination in 2008 for Lemon Tree, which also won her an Asia Pacific Screen Award. Past recipients of the honor include Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, Isabella Rossellini and Alice Rohrwacher.
She has worked behind the camera too. Abbass directed the 2012 feature Inheritance, about a Palestinian woman caught in the conflict between Israel and Lebanon, and appeared in Bye Bye Tiberias, her daughter Lina Soualem’s 2023 documentary about several generations of the family. Her latest premiere, Danielle Arbid’s Only Rebels Win, opened in the Berlinale’s Panorama section in February. She next appears in Daughter of Eden, a British feature from filmmaker Fateme Ahmadi, backed by BBC Film and the BFI.
The Academy has arranged for the European culture channel ARTE to present a selection of her films. Abbass resists easy labels. At last year’s Cairo International Film Festival, which gave her a lifetime achievement award, she said “I’ve never belonged to one cinema or another.” She calls cinema a universal language that she speaks whenever a project speaks her own.
