Exiled Iranian filmmaker Sepideh Farsi shares a series of intimate conversations with Palestinian photojournalist Fatima Hassouna in Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, which screened in the Horizons section of this year’s Karlovy Vary International Film Festival after debuting at Cannes in May. This disarmingly personal documentary feels like a voice smuggled out of Gaza for the world to hear—and makes its climactic events, which occurred just weeks before the Cannes premiere, utterly devastating.
Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk is almost entirely composed of a series of video calls between Farsi and Hassouna during the spring and summer of 2024, during which the photojournalist describes daily life in the active war zone of Gaza City. During multiple scenes, we hear bombs going off in the distance. Hassouna turns her camera to clouds of smoke blocks away, where buildings once stood.
The director had intended to interview Hassouna in person, but was unable to make it past Cairo into Palestine, so instead records their conversations through a series of calls. Hassouna doesn’t have great access to internet, and many calls pause, stutter, and unexpectedly drop. This difficulty in even communicating with her creates a sense that the film is presenting something we’re not supposed to be hearing and seeing.
Instead of using footage of Hassouna directly from the video calls, Farsi instead films her own devices through a second camera, giving us insight into the director’s own life. In multiple scenes, she excuses herself from the conversation with Hassouna to let her cat into her Paris apartment, bringing the camera with her. The sense of carrying on with our own lives, helpless to offer assistance, is not lost on her.
Conversations range from the stark horrors that surround Hassouna—tearful memories of the close friends and relatives that have been killed in Israeli airstrikes—to the mundane details of her daily life in what remains of Gaza City. Photographs from her Instagram account help paint a picture beyond what the video calls can present.
Farsi doesn’t pull punches. She asks Hassouna about the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel that ignited the latest round of aggression. Hassouna expresses a certain sense of pride that her people were able to fight back against oppression, regardless of the consequences. It’s a complex and emotional issue that is not dwelt on, but is vital to understanding this person that we are getting to know.
That Hassouna does not outright condemn the October 7 attacks will be enough for some viewers to form an opinion about her. But she does not blindly support Hamas and its actions; later on, she will express strong disapproval of leader Yahya Sinwar. It might be enough to say that Hassouna herself did not personally participate in violence, and is therefore an innocent victim of war, but these brief insights into her beliefs are what help us understand a complex and very real person.
Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk ends with a meta-epilogue consisting of one final call between Farsi and Hassouna, where the filmmaker shares that her movie has been accepted to the Cannes Film Festival, and the photojournalist expresses hope that she might be able to attend the premiere. On-screen text then informs us that Hassouna and nine members of her family were killed in an Israeli airstrike the following day.
The world hears about the violence in Gaza almost every day, to such an extent that many may be become numb to the horrors. Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk gives us a chance to experience it first-hand, by getting to know one of its victims—bright, complex, and relatable—in such raw and personal terms.
By focusing so intimately on one single voice, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk captures the unbearable tension between everyday life and extraordinary violence. Farsi’s approach is restrained but unflinching, allowing Fatima Hassouna to emerge not just as a casualty of war, but as a living, thinking, feeling person we come to know on unusually personal terms—before she is lost forever.
