The assassination of the young Palestinian photographer Fatma Hassona by the Israeli army on April 16, 2025, the day after the announcement of the selection at the Cannes Festival of the film dedicated to her, aroused legitimate emotion. The countless and anonymous crimes committed – before and since – during the current genocidal war in the Gaza Strip find an atrocious and necessary personification.
But this new and sinister function of the film should not make it disappear as such, for all that is unique that is active there. The young woman nicknamed “Fatem”, the journey and decisions of Iranian filmmaker Sepideh Farsi, the choices of direction, including under the weight of overwhelming circumstances but as cinematic responses, make Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk a powerful and fragile film, necessary.
“A miracle happened when I met Fatma Hassona, online, through a Palestinian friend. She has since lent me her eyes to see Gaza as it resists and documents the war. And I am in touch with her, from her “Gaza prison” as she says. We maintained this lifeline for more than 200 days. The bits of pixels and sounds that we exchanged became the film. wrote the director last April, when she thought she could present this film at Cannes in the company of the woman who occupies the screen.
Iranian filmmaker, long exiled in France, author of films – fiction, documentaries, animated films (The Mermaid2023) – most often devoted to the situation in her country, Sepideh Farsi has also been present in other places where human suffering is concentrated, notably the Greek camps where thousands of would-be migrants are parked.
It is respecting Sepideh Farsi and Fatma Hassona not to make their film disappear under the anger and pain that this crime inspires.
In the extreme tension of the ongoing massacre in the Gaza Strip, but also in the joy affirmed as a challenge by Fatma Hassona and in the complicit intelligence between the two women, the director of Tehran without authorization (2009) and Tomorrow I cross (2019) brought into existence Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walkwhich was presented in Cannes by the Association of Independent Cinema for its distribution (ACID).
The atrocity that took place immediately after the announcement of the film’s selection – the murder of Fatma Hassona and several members of her family by the Israeli army, which had “targeted” the young woman according to the collective of independent researchers Forensic Architecture – provoked intense emotion, which must not be allowed to die out.
But it is respecting Sepideh Farsi and Fatma Hassona not to make their film disappear under the anger and pain that this crime inspires. Mainly composed of recordings of exchanges between the filmmaker and the photographer on WhatsApp and Telegram, it is dominated by this smile that the Palestinian photojournalist wears almost all the time, including when evoking razed houses and torn bodies.
May what this young woman embodied continue to exist
Faced with this smile, we think of a scene from I’m still here by Walter Salles (2024) where, after her husband is tortured to death by the Brazilian military dictatorship, the mother decides that her family will only appear publicly with a smile on their lips. But Fatem is not just a young woman who smiles.
Lucid, capable of mobilizing humor as well as analysis, author of strong images that emerge from the mass of representations of the endless ruins resulting from the incessant shelling of the IDF for almost two years on inhabited neighborhoods, Fatma Hassona is not just an icon of daily resistance at the time she was filmed, who has since become an image of martyrdom.
In the film, where several of her images appear, she is also an artist and a journalist – therefore in increased danger, since Israel has killed at least 220 Palestinian journalists in the Gaza Strip since the start of the war, according to Reporters Without Borders. A selection of his photos, accompanied in particular by part of his dialogue with Sepideh Farsi, has just been published by Éditions Textuel under the title The Eyes of Gazaafter having been exhibited in numerous galleries and at the Visa pour l’image festival, the major annual photojournalism event, in Perpignan.
Fatma Hassona was also a lively, active, curious young woman, who took care of her family, led workshops for children in a nearby half-destroyed school, and was going to get married a few days after the film was presented.
For all these reasons, we must hope that this murder does not cause the person who was its victim to disappear, precisely under the sole status of victim. Sepideh Farsi’s entire film, including the part given to the small moments of everyday life, on one side and on the other of always unstable communications, contributes to what this young woman embodied continues stubbornly to exist.
Bringing to life a cinematographic form that has developed in recent years, the documentary based on captures of computer or smartphone screens, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk is also a remarkable moment in the extension of the domain of taking reality into account through cinema.
Sensory translations of terror
The tension between the big cinema screen and the small screens of smartphones, a tension redoubled by the use of vertical shooting on cell phones within a horizontal “big picture”, contributes to this. It is also one of the important contributions of the work on sound, where the violence of the detonations, the maddening obsession created by the omnipresence of drones, the poor quality of internet connections are mobilized as sensory translations of the omnipresent terror.
The technical “defects”, which sometimes also concern the image and the colors, contribute to the construction of a singular form, which echoes the omnipresent violence of the situation. It is in no way a question of even partial equivalence, it is indeed a question of a work on the form, both as an opening and as a disturbance.
The cinematographic gesture is in its place here, it does not duplicate what the media can relay. It constructs a story impressively embodied by Fatem and a unique relationship between the young Palestinian woman and the Iranian filmmaker. It provokes a movement of the spectator thanks to the formal choices, at the same time as the sharing of elements of information of which we know that it is not enough that they have once been transmitted, elsewhere and otherwise.
So Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk is also a significant contribution to the modest but necessary work of cinema to respond to and respond to the ongoing genocide.
Nobody believes that films will stop the massacre. But the obstinate, inventive presence, renewed in its forms and its angles of approach of cinema, echoing the mass crimes of which we are contemporaries, nevertheless participates in slow, fatally slow overall movements which will contribute to preventing “military victories” which are counted in tens of thousands of murdered civilians from being without cost for those who commit them.
As with Yesby Israeli Nadav Lapid, released September 17; as with The Voice of Hind Rajabby Tunisian Kaouther Ben Hania, film awarded a Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival and which will be released on November 26; to its extent, thanks to the film by Sepideh Farsi, cinema plays its role in the process of recognition of what is happening at the moment.
