“You watch Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk for what Fatima Hassouna embodies and expresses, not for its cinematic value.”
“This time will pass.”
15 April 2025. ACID, Cannes’ smallest section, announces its line-up. One of the films is Iranian director Sepideh Farsi’s Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, in which she, through a series of videocalls, captures life in Gaza under fire through the eyes of a young photojournalist, Fatima Hassouna.
16 April 2025. Fatima Hassouna is killed in an Israeli airstrike, along with nine family members. In an instant, Farsi’s film takes on another meaning.
In the spring of 2024 Sepideh Farsi is in Cairo, trying get into Gaza via Rafah; this proves impossible. Driven to make the world somehow see what is going on in the small strip of land under siege, she starts a longterm conversation with a young woman living in Gaza, Fatima Hassouna. Already six months into the horror that Israel unleashed on Gaza, it it striking how Hassouna’s radiant smile rarely fades, one of those smiles that extends to the eyes. Missiles hitting homes nearby, Apaches flying around looking for kills, not being able to go out: it seems like nothing can get her down. When she remarks that two people were killed the day before, she almost shrugs it off when saying, “that’s normal.”
Of course it isn’t normal, but Farsi shows the defiant spirit of the Palestinian people going through this hell. “We have nothing to lose,” is Hassouna’s simple explanation. She has no intention to leave Gaza, as she feels Gaza needs her, and thinks the world should see her photos to understand what is happening. She also wants to document it for her children, so she can show them what she survived. Her death is a grim reminder that hopes and dreams too are shattered in Gaza, not just buildings. Young people’s hopes and dreams of a better life, a safer life, of going abroad. Hassouna wants to see Rome, she says, and expresses her desire to go to an amusement park. Sepideh promises her they will visit one together once the war is over. It wasn’t to be.
By virtue of the limitations on both sides of the phone camera, Farsi has to resort to filming her phone (with another phone) during the conversations in order to give Hassouna a face. This means that Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk essentially becomes a ‘talking head’ interview like one would see on any news program. Farsi connects their conversations through interludes in which Hassouna’s photos show the destruction and bloodshed caused by the IDF, as well as excerpts from news reports that allow the viewer to track the progress of the genocide through key moments in the 10-month period the film covers; from a failed ceasefire to Israel blocking humanitarian aid, and from Israeli protests on home soil to the election of Yahya Sinwar as the leader of Hamas. The bulk of the film, however, is Hassouna talking about getting through life in an embattled Gaza, ranging from the hardship of starvation, the only moment in the film when Hassouna’s spirit seems broken, to lighthearted chats about coffee and quoting The Shawshank Redemption (“Hope is a dangerous thing“, a quote that has become all the more poignant in the film’s aftermath). In these segments the film rides on the content of the conversation and on Hassouna’s winning personality for the most part, as visually it has very little to offer. Farsi weaves in some poignant juxtapositions, such as Hassouna’s clips of a destroyed Gaza versus a shot of the skyline of an unnamed Canadian city that Farsi shows her, or Farsi regaling Hassouna about the various locations in the world she is calling from set against Hassouna being stuck in one place. But there is only so much you can do with footage of a phone screen, and it starts to wear the film down as it progresses; countless disconnects and garbled words from Gaza can become as frustrating to the viewer as they must have been to Farsi. You watch Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk for what Fatima Hassouna embodies and expresses, not for its cinematic value.
The opening line about time at the top of this page, spoken by Hassouna near the end of the film, speaks of hope. The concluding line below, one that comes in one of the earliest conversations, does too. Unfortunately neither came true for Hassouna, just as it didn’t come true for tens of thousands of others. Despite this not being Farsi’s plan at the outset, unaware that her subject would be killed before the film even premiered, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk should therefore mostly be seen not just as a tribute to Fatima Hassouna, but to so many innocent victims of Israel’s brutal and relentless campaign in Gaza. Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk gives these people a face, a face that the world, and especially those in power, should stare directly in the eyes to see its humanity. And maybe we can then muster a little hope ourselves for a safe outcome for those still trapped in Gaza.
“They can’t defeat us.”