Sepideh Farsi’s “Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk” arrives not merely as a documentary, but as a shard of fractured looking glass, reflecting a reality one might prefer to remain unseen. At its flickering heart pulses the ephemeral presence of Fatma Hassona, a young Palestinian photojournalist whose Gaza existence became both subject and abyss.
The film’s architecture is deceptively simple: a tenuous bridge of video calls, pixels struggling to transmit the weight of a soul navigating the maelstrom of intense conflict with Farsi. Yet, this digital communion is now haunted by an irremediable silence. Fatma Hassona was killed in an Israeli airstrike on April 16th, 2025, a breath after learning this very film—her image, her voice—would travel to Cannes.
The work transmutes, then, before our eyes, from chronicle to eulogy, her final testimony delivered from beyond the veil. What began as a dialogue on survival becomes a monologue from the edge of nothingness, a stark meditation on a spirit’s luminescence against the encroaching, absolute dark, a sorrowful celebration of what was.
A Hand Reaching Through Static
Sepideh Farsi, a filmmaker whose lens has long sought the tremors in landscapes of constraint and the echoes within conflicted Iranian terrains, found herself at another closed border in the spring of 2024. Denied passage into Gaza at Rafah, her impulse to bear witness—that fundamental human, perhaps fundamentally futile, gesture—was forced to seek another conduit.
The tangible world recoiled, so the gaze turned inwards, towards the flickering portal of the remote. Thus began a dialogue born of impediment, a connection sought across the static chasm separating worlds. A name, Fatma Hassona, surfaced through the whispers of acquaintance, a voice waiting within the besieged strip. Their conversations, commencing around April 2024, spun out over months, each pixelated exchange a fragile assertion of existence against a backdrop of dissolution.
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An unlikely tether formed, this filament of shared words and images becoming, for Fatma, a window to a world beyond the concrete and the fear, and for Farsi, a glimpse into the furnace. It was less a friendship in conventional terms, perhaps, than a mutual haunting: two souls tethered by the screen’s imperfect light, a lifeline thrown across the deafening roar of an indifferent history.
A Smile Forged in Hellfire
And what of Fatma Hassona, the epicentre of this visual threnody? Her smile, described as vast, radiant, appears not as a mask but as a fissure through which an unquenchable, perhaps terrifying, life-force erupts amidst the charnel grounds. This is the “life in this dead” she sought to excavate, a resilience bordering on the elemental, offered without the solace of self-pity even as familiar shades—an aunt, a friend—dissolved into the anonymous calculus of war. Her English, broken yet potent, becomes the very dialect of extremity, each phrase a testament.
She chose the lens, an amateur archivist of both ruin and the obstinate pulse of children’s games, believing Gaza’s truth required her gaze, her images a desperate semaphore to an oblivious world, a legacy for a future she would narrate as “survived.” The film’s title, her own utterance—”you put your soul in your hand and you walk”—is no mere poetry; it is the bare, unvarnished physics of her every venture beyond shelter.
How casually she speaks of Apaches deployed “to kill us,” how “normal” death’s daily reaping becomes. This chilling lucidity extends to the inventory of obliteration—”many different options to die here”—a refrain echoed even by her eight-year-old niece’s desire for an end. Hope, that dangerous thing she’d quote from another tale of confinement, would sometimes fray, particularly under starvation’s slow siege or the fresh wound of loss.
Her dreams of Rome, of amusement parks, flutter like ghostly butterflies against the wire. A fleeting critique of a Hamas leader grounds her in the political mire, yet her essence transcends it: compassion for the hungry, a young woman of twenty-four years whose light was not so much extinguished as proven catastrophically finite against an overwhelming shadow.
Static and Substance: Gazing into the Mundane Apocalypse
The film unfolds, then, not as a constructed narrative but as an accumulation of temporal fragments, a diary of days measured from one precarious video call to the next, beginning in that spring of 2024. Conversation, raw and unadorned, is the vessel; its stuttering flow, punctuated by the screen’s freezing terror or the sudden void of a severed connection—these are not imperfections, but the very texture of a life lived under technological and existential siege. Each re-established link feels like a minor resurrection, a brief defiance of the encroaching silence.
Through this fractured lens, glimpses of Gazan existence accumulate with the weight of revelation. The sky is a constant thrum of menace—bombings, the predatory whine of aircraft. Below, the earth denies its sustenance: water, power, food itself becoming phantoms. Fatma’s dream of chocolate, of chicken, is the poetry of a body ground down to its essence, the spectre of starvation a silent, patient predator.
The litany of loss is recited with an almost unbearable calm – an aunt’s fragmented remains, friends turned to memory – each story a fresh incision into the viewer’s own carefully guarded sense of order. Displacement is the norm, shelter a transient concept. And the psyche? It twists, it adapts, it perhaps numbs; the “normal” is recalibrated daily against a backdrop of unimaginable horror, a fear so pervasive it seeps into the desires of children.
Yet, startlingly, life’s mundane rituals persist: a shared glance, a family member drifting into frame, even Farsi’s cat making its alien appearance – brief, absurd anchors in a sea of dread. These are intercut with the cold, disembodied pronouncements of global news networks, the abstract language of geopolitics – peace initiatives, court rulings, hostage counts. Fatma’s voice, her immediate reality, slices through this official script, transforming sterile headlines into visceral truths, forcing a confrontation with the granular agony beneath the grand, indifferent narratives.
Static and Substance: Gazing into the Mundane Apocalypse
The film unfolds, then, not as a constructed narrative but as an accumulation of temporal fragments, a diary of days measured from one precarious video call to the next, beginning in that spring of 2024. Conversation, raw and unadorned, is the vessel; its stuttering flow, punctuated by the screen’s freezing terror or the sudden void of a severed connection—these are not imperfections, but the very texture of a life lived under technological and existential siege. Each re-established link feels like a minor resurrection, a brief defiance of the encroaching silence.
Through this fractured lens, glimpses of Gazan existence accumulate with the weight of revelation. The sky is a constant thrum of menace—bombings, the predatory whine of aircraft. Below, the earth denies its sustenance: water, power, food itself becoming phantoms. Fatma’s dream of chocolate, of chicken, is the poetry of a body ground down to its essence, the spectre of starvation a silent, patient predator.
The litany of loss is recited with an almost unbearable calm – an aunt’s fragmented remains, friends turned to memory – each story a fresh incision into the viewer’s own carefully guarded sense of order. Displacement is the norm, shelter a transient concept. And the psyche? It twists, it adapts, it perhaps numbs; the “normal” is recalibrated daily against a backdrop of unimaginable horror, a fear so pervasive it seeps into the desires of children.
Yet, startlingly, life’s mundane rituals persist: a shared glance, a family member drifting into frame, even Farsi’s cat making its alien appearance – brief, absurd anchors in a sea of dread. These are intercut with the cold, disembodied pronouncements of global news networks, the abstract language of geopolitics – peace initiatives, court rulings, hostage counts. Fatma’s voice, her immediate reality, slices through this official script, transforming sterile headlines into visceral truths, forcing a confrontation with the granular agony beneath the grand, indifferent narratives.
Fleeting Sparks in an Infinite Night
What, then, gleams from this abyss? Not the facile endurance of an abstract “human spirit,” but something far more unsettling: the tenacity of a singular smile, Fatma’s, defiant as a wildflower on a grave. Her laughter, a raw testament against the encroaching silence, transforms abstract notions of conflict into the acute throb of a stolen future.
This film, this “unfiltered evidence,” becomes an act of desperate reclamation—her voice, Farsi’s amplification, a fragile assertion of a unique existence. Their connection, a filament across continents and sieges, speaks of a primal human need to reach out, even into the void. Yet, hope, that “dangerous thing,” emerges here as a cruel paradox: utterly essential for the daily, grinding mechanics of survival, yet rendered almost unbearable by its constant, brutal negation.
Fatma’s search for life amidst annihilation, her resolve to document what she intended to survive, is less a triumph than a profound, sorrowful dance with the inevitable, a fleeting spark against the backdrop of an infinite, indifferent night.
The Film as Epitaph
One cannot, now, encounter this film except through the chilling prism of its protagonist’s end. Fatma Hassona’s death, occurring just as her story prepared to meet the world, rips “Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk” from the stream of mere chronicle and engraves it as a memorial, stark and unyielding. It is no longer a window but a tomb, through which her laughter echoes with an almost unbearable poignancy.
Her individual tragedy inevitably bleeds outwards, her face becoming a cipher for a multitude of silenced innocents in Gaza, each stolen future a resonant chord in this cinematic requiem. Yet, the film fiercely guards her singularity. This is its enduring, terrible value: to thrust a deeply human, particular countenance upon the depersonalized ledgers of conflict, to insist on the irreplaceable texture of one life.
Farsi’s act of preservation becomes an inadvertent consecration; Fatma’s voice, her image, her fleeting, indomitable presence are now fixed, a spectral testimony against the forces of erasure. The film breathes, therefore, not with solutions, but with the weight of a humanity laid bare, demanding, if nothing else, the discomfort of recognition.
Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk is a French-Palestinian-Iranian co-production that premiered on May 15, 2025, in the ACID section of the 78th Cannes Film Festival.
Full Credits
Director: Sepideh Farsi
Writer: Sepideh Farsi
Producers: Javad Djavahery, Annie Ohayon Dekel
Cast: Sepideh Farsi, Fatima Hassouna
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Sepideh Farsi
Editors: Sepideh Farsi, Farahnaz Sharifi
Composer: Cinna Peyghamy
The Review
Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk
A devastatingly crucial piece of cinema, "Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk" is an inadvertent epitaph etched in static and sorrow. Transcending mere documentary, it becomes a harrowing, essential confrontation with a reality unblinkingly observed. Fatma Hassona’s luminous defiance, captured before her extinguishing, transforms this raw chronicle into a spectral testament. It is an unsparing gaze into the abyss, demanding not judgment, but a profound, disquieting witness.
PROS
- The film serves as an unintentional yet powerful memorial to Fatma Hassona, lending it immense emotional depth and lasting significance.
- Its raw, unpolished video-call aesthetic and embrace of technical imperfections offer a brutally honest and unfiltered immersion into a life under extreme duress.
- Fatma Hassona’s resilience, radiant spirit, and candid vulnerability in the face of unimaginable horror create a deeply human and indelible portrait.
- The film compels a direct, uncomfortable engagement with the personal realities of conflict, far removed from detached news reports.
- It preserves a singular, intimate voice from within a wider tragedy, offering a spectral testimony against erasure.
CONS
- The film’s subject matter and the tragic fate of its protagonist make for an inherently harrowing and sorrowful viewing experience.
- The relentless, sometimes monotonous depiction of daily siege, while thematically resonant, can be an attritional watch.
- The viewing experience can foster a deep and unsettling sense of helplessness, mirroring the impossible situation depicted.
