On October 7, 2024, Israel’s occupation of Gaza took new shape as a publicly declared war. At the time, Iranian filmmaker Sepideh Farsi was traveling around the world presenting a film about the conflict she experienced firsthand as a child in Iran. Meanwhile, in Gaza, 24-year-old Palestinian journalist Fatma Hassona watched in horror as the night sky lit up with electric-white streaks of incoming missiles like lightning. As Farsi followed the genocide in Gaza, she felt drawn to cover it somehow, but couldn’t find a way into the occupied zone. Through Palestinian refugees, she finds Fatma, and a beautiful virtual relationship begins to blossom.
“Meeting her was like a mirror, held in front of me that made me realize how both of our lives were conditioned by walls and wars.” That’s the premise of Sepideh Farsi’s gripping Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, the FaceTime- and phone-recording film that rose from the most fringe sidebar section of Cannes to a powerhouse fall festival run to a limited release in the U.S. and abroad. As Fatma fills Farsi in on the horrific day-to-day realities of life in Gaza, the filmmaker listens, learns, and connects the dots between Israel and Iran’s regimes.
Fatma’s ruinous first-person account brings a devastatingly immersive Palestinian suffering to the screen in hopes of communicating the unbelievable reality of the situation in Gaza. After her home was partially destroyed, Fatma and her family were forced to flee to Northeast Gaza. They live ten people to one room. They wake up early to collect water, because there isn’t running water in the house. There’s no electricity, fruit, flour, vegetables, or chocolate. Israeli bombs go off all day, causing the ground beneath their feet to shake.
No one could leave home for two months because there were snipers on neighboring roofs mid-hunt. Evacuating to the west as told, they’re bombed yet again, so they go back to the Northeast. At one point, Fatma loses thirteen friends and family members in a neighboring building’s strike that murders grandparents and grandchildren alike. Even a one-year-old. Bombs don’t discern. People die regularly of starvation. Apache helicopters hover menacingly over the neighborhood, picking off any Palestinian who dares enter their line of sight. She finds the head of her aunt on a street nearby, sans body.
Fatma is a fantastic photographer, an even better poet, and perhaps the most glowing soul that side of Gaza, which makes her erosion over the year’s worth of FaceTime calls to Farsi even harder to witness. Calls are occasionally interrupted by Fatma’s photography, or a sound recording of bombs hitting neighboring apartments, or a news segment about another strike capped off with a new death toll, or Farsi letting her cat inside, or first-person videos of the fresh hell Israel has wrought in Gaza. But it’s Fatma’s documentary photography that fills most of the interludes: beauty and destruction, death and life, love and war, presented in equal measure across each image.
Farsi’s approach (filming the FaceTimes on her phone with a separate handheld iPhone that she points at the screen) brings a fresh tension to a mundane reality as calls are beleaguered by bad service. The constant digital in-and-out breakage is somehow engaging in a way that phone calls breaking up in real time could never be. Where it frustrates in real life, here it creates a sense of mystery, so many of Fatma’s words left hanging in half sentences, halted dreams, and severed thoughts.
Farsi, the renowned Iranian documentarian, is both student and teacher––a student of the war in Gaza on behalf of the rest of the world, researching and recording, while also a teacher to Fatma, who doesn’t at first realize that the woman interviewing her was forced to flee her own war-torn country at 18 and unable to return. Ultimately, Fatma doesn’t have that choice. She’s walled in.
As ceasefire negotiations stall, break, falter, and disappear time and again, the people of Gaza wait in fear as their population dwindles. Schools, hospitals, and houses of worship are obliterated alongside most housing. The calls between the two women become less frequent as time goes on, and when they do happen, Fatma’s demeanor is sunken. At the beginning of the calls in April 2024, Fatma’s hope is contagious, and she means to spread it. By the end, she’s quoting Shawshank Redemption: “Hope is a very dangerous thing.”
It’s not until September that she describes herself as depressed, talks about being numbed by all the death, and admits she now watches everything in silence with no reaction or will to act. A desperation for normalcy floods her mind like a fantasy as she realizes she lives in a prison, or worse. Without enough food, she’s always too tired and just wants to breathe fresh air and experience peace. Her George Harrison hope is simple while feeling impossible in context: all things must pass.
One day after their final FaceTime on April 15, 2025, when Farsi tells Fatma the film has been accepted into Cannes, Fatma and six others are killed in their sleep during a routine bombing. Her death gives an urgency to her story that courses through the veins of Farsi’s investigative, eyes-wide-open documentary, making it a must-see to continue facing the reality of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk is now in theaters.