THE STORY – The documentary depicts life in Gaza during the ongoing Israeli military campaign, captured through director Sepideh Farsi’s video calls with a young Palestinian photojournalist living there.
THE CAST – Sepideh Farsi & Fatma Hassona
THE TEAM – Sepideh Farsi (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 113 Minutes
As we watch the smiling face of 25-year-old Palestinian photojournalist Fatma Hassona for the first 100+ minutes of “Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk,” Hassona’s smile has never shown brighter when, late in the film, its Iranian director Sepideh Farsi tells her that their documentary has been accepted for this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Together, the two women excitedly plan to get Hassona to France so that they can meet in person for the very first time. Hours later, Hassona and her entire family would be dead, killed by an Israeli bomb attack.
The news hits especially hard since, over the course of Farsi’s documentary, we have come to know and care for this sunny journalist who maintained a sense of hope, even as the war in Gaza intensified and bombs were dropping around her. It is through the year-long WhatsApp video chats with Farsi, who would regularly check in from around the globe, that Hassona was able to impart what she observed in the day-to-day life in Gaza, with families trying to maintain a life of normalcy while the world around them was crumbling.
The idea for the documentary originated with Farsi, who was eager to gain a perspective on life in Gaza by traveling to Rafah to witness the devastation firsthand. She was summarily denied admittance, so Farsi turned to a Palestinian refugee she had met in Cairo, who in turn connected her with Hassona. The first conversation between the women was awkward — but only technologically, as one smartphone was communicating with another while the meeting was being filmed. The substance of that conversation, however, was anything but ordinary.
At first, Farsi, ever the documentarian, posed questions to set the scene, searching for details about the war. After seeing Hassona’s openness about how it’s affecting her life, however, the questions became more personal. How is she feeling? How is her family doing? What’s life like for you every day? As we watch, we see the social differences fall away as their chemistry takes hold. From that moment, Hassona’s words and her camera became our eyes and ears in Gaza.
Farsi’s decision to present the film as small images on a smartphone screen can make the documentary appear ragged at times and often creates unpredictable situations. Like many phone conversations, interruptions happen — Farsi with her demanding cat, Hassona with her many family members, and choppers flying near the family’s Gaza apartment. Wi-Fi signals can also go out, and on occasion, Hassona is so anxious to pick up the conversation again that she travels to a friend’s house to get a better Wi-Fi signal. In reality, the difficulty of even calling one another serves to emphasize the distance between the women, both in miles and in their everyday lives.
Aware that filming phone conversations would not be enough to present the larger picture of life in Gaza, Farsi supplements the film with two key elements: contemporary news footage of the latest developments in the war and, most revealingly, Hassona’s own photographs, which capture the destroyed buildings and damaged lives that the bombings have caused. But what’s most striking about her images is the faces of the people that she captured. So many of them are smiling, even amid the rubble, as if to say, “We’re going to get through this.”
That optimistic spirit is reflected in almost every conversation with Hassona, her smile present even when speaking of friends who have been killed in the bombing. Her hopeful anticipation of peace talks early in the war is tempered by our own realization of how that all came to naught. There are times, however, when her smile appears to be used as a mask to conceal her own diminishing hope about the war’s outcome and the toll it has already taken on her family and community.
That mask has never been more present than when she talks openly about death. Seeing it happen to her friends and neighbors, she acknowledges its constant presence in her everyday life, but she is determined not to let that stop her. Her hope remained to the end, as she explained in one of her later conversations with Farsi that she looked forward to the day “when I can tell my children what I have lived, and what I have survived.” Sadly, that was not to be.
“Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk” was never intended to be a comprehensive account of the Gaza War over the past year. Instead, it serves as a snapshot of one last year in the life of a young Palestinian artist whose courage and honesty now have the power to change minds and touch hearts. And that, in the long term, can be as powerful a weapon as any.
