Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk offers an intimate, first-hand perspective of life in Gaza, told through a series of video calls between filmmaker Sepideh Farsi and young Palestinian photojournalist Fatma Hassona. Their digital dialogue became a vital record, bearing witness to everyday life, loss, and acts of resistance amid escalating violence. Just a day after the film’s selection at Cannes, Fatma was tragically killed in an Israeli airstrike on her home. This heartbreaking loss deepens the film’s impact, which combines raw immediacy with profound humanity to portray the stark realities of daily life during conflict, seen through the eyes of those trapped in an endless cycle of war and living under siege.
The Garden Cinema View:
Watching the year-long conversation between photojournalist Fatma Hassouna and filmmaker Sepideh Farsi is nothing but devastating given the outcome. The day after the film's Cannes 2025 selection, Hassouna was killed in an Israeli strike in Gaza. Her death sparked global condemnation of both her killing and governments' passivity and silence regarding the atrocities in Gaza. As Ken Loach and Paul Laverty astutely observed in their note of solidarity, ‘Hassouna - who died with her two sisters, three brothers, and father - joins what Reporters Without Borders calls “the massacre” of journalists, now approaching 200, over the last 18 months.’
The documentary contrasts pixelated WhatsApp conversations with Hassouna's sharp photographs of rubble, starvation, and devastation. Yet throughout, her grace comes through - always smiling, never self-pitying, and refusing to leave Gaza because it's her home. She transmits news of dying relatives and her own starvation with stoic humour that barely conceals her anger.
Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk is an urgent documentary on the tens of thousands of Palestinians killed since the war began.
