Many individuals have felt, with a way of responsible unreality, that the genocide in Gaza is one thing occurring on their telephones. That is actually the case in Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Stroll, director Sepideh Farsi’s profile of the younger Palestinian photographer Fatima Hassouna, who seems primarily through WhatsApp video calls with Farsi, in addition to in pictures, textual content messages, attachments and voice memos. Farsi merely movies her cellphone—she’s seen within the picture-in-picture—and within the film theatre, no less than, Hassouna fills the display and instructions your undivided consideration.
Hassouna has a magnetic presence, with straight white tooth typically bared in an anxious smile, whilst our notion of her is occluded by the raspy audio and laggy pixels that symbolize the obstacles between the West and Gaza: a bodily blockade, degrading communications infrastructure, selective media narratives. Hassouna calls from residence, a good friend’s home, a shelter, a rooftop—wherever she will be able to get a cost and a sign. The dialogue proceeds in suits and begins, interrupted by sound that glitches, video that cuts out, calls that drop, gadgets that typically rattle with the sudden percussion of Israeli bombs. Hassouna and Farsi, an Iranian-born French filmmaker, communicate collectively in English. The movie spans a yr nearly precisely to the day, from April 2024 to April 2025, and reminds the viewer of the timeline of the present battle’s first yr: the false hope of a ceasefire, the blocked help, the destroyed hospitals, the assault on Rafah, the rising spectre of hunger.
Farsi jumps proper into the deep finish throughout what seems to be their first dialog, following an introduction brokered by one of many director’s contacts—she instantly asks Hassouna if her home has been destroyed. They construct rapport as Hassouna strikes by means of moods of alternating defiance (the genocide makes her “proud” to be Palestinian, as a result of “they’ll’t defeat us”) and despair (it’s unhappy when you’ll be able to’t have any of your goals, she begins to say simply earlier than the picture on Farsi’s cellphone turns agonizingly black). She is as giddy as a baby when she will get her palms on some junk meals for the primary time in months; she is a supply of fear for Farsi when her anxious silences lengthen, or when she admits she has not eaten at the moment; and she or he is a font of loving excessive spirits each time she takes a name alongside certainly one of her younger relations. “He’s by no means seen a girl such as you, a overseas girl,” she explains to Farsi as a toddler stares wide-eyed at her cellphone.
Farsi provides platitudes she is aware of are insufficient, and Hassouna reassures her that her very presence, as a good friend and witness and occasional supplier of cat photos, is consolation sufficient. The 2 bond over their experiences of oppression, although their biographies usually are not precisely equal, as Hassouna is underneath bombardment from an occupying authorities, and Farsi was persecuted and compelled into exile by her personal. She expresses sceptical curiosity about Hassouna’s option to put on a headband, and probes for her emotions about Hamas—which, in any case, is a proxy of the Iranian state that imprisoned her earlier than her exile to Europe.
The dynamic between a Muslim Gen Z revolutionary and a secular Gen X liberal is one imbalance amongst a number of that can resonate with American audiences. Although the self-esteem of the movie inverts Farsi’s life, pushing her on a regular basis environment to the margins of the body, it peeks by means of—she typically calls Gaza whereas on work journeys to worldwide movie festivals, or from a trip. Hassouna appears to be excited at this, reasonably than jealous or resentful. Farsi’s self-conscious avowals that the 2 will go to this or that place collectively, sometime, when the warfare is over, triggers a viewer’s consciousness of his personal privilege, however additionally it is evident that Hassouna takes Farsi extra severely due to her creative way of life—that Farsi resides a life that Hassouna desires for herself, a lifetime of freedom of motion and mental stimulation.
A nonetheless from Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Stroll (2025) Courtesy of Kino Lorber
Farsi was lucky to be linked to such a compelling documentary topic. Charismatic, considerate and craving, Hassouna at occasions looks as if the imaginative projection of sympathetic Westerners envisioning an ideal sufferer, although saying this diminishes the subjectivity evident in her appreciable creative expertise. Hassouna wrote poetry and composed songs on her guitar earlier than she bought it purchase her digital camera, and what we hear of each is mournful and complicated, although Hassouna is adamant that she discovered her vocation in pictures, even earlier than turning into a photojournalist by necessity. She goals of touring overseas to study picture enhancing applied sciences and research lighting.
“I attempt to discover some life” Hassouna tells Farsi of her pictures, that are reproduced in montages all through the movie. The life that she finds, in photos steadily taken within the aftermath of bombings, is commonly a pop of color in opposition to a backdrop of rubble: the T-shirt of a posing baby, a defiant flag or flower, or rugs airing out on the balcony of a blasted-out house constructing. Later within the movie, the color is extra steadily blood, pooling within the mud or staining a severed hand. The final shot of the lower of the movie that was invited to the Acid number of this yr’s Cannes Movie Competition is a protracted video taken throughout daytime, displaying life persisting in a greater than half-ruined metropolis. On the soundtrack, Hassouna explains that she imagines her pictures shall be a technique to present her future youngsters what she as soon as endured.
It’s a becoming ending, to which two scenes had been amended earlier than the movie’s world premiere. Within the first, Farsi calls Hassouna on the day of the announcement to share that the movie has been accepted to Cannes—a pageant Hassouna has heard of, and is raring to attend, if the passport and visa may be labored out, although she is evident that she would return residence to her household afterwards. Within the second added scene, a title card reveals that Hassouna was killed together with six members of her household by an Israeli airstrike the day after the Cannes programme was introduced.
Some commentators have questioned the complete enterprise of Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Stroll. Farsi obtained good opinions and a giant premiere out of a movie that nearly actually made its topic a precedence goal for the Israel Protection Forces. Then once more, Hassouna had beforehand declared that, “If I die, I need a loud demise”. It will be too easy to say that that was the contract she entered into with this movie, however equally, a second title card reminds viewers that Israeli forces have killed tons of of journalists in Gaza since their offensive started, many in focused assaults. Hassouna made herself a goal just by selecting up a digital camera. Or, actually, just by current. The conditional tense of Hassouna’s “If I die…” at the moment appears, horribly, quaint; the movie no less than fulfills the second clause.
Watch the trailer for Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Stroll:
Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Stroll screens on the New York Movie Competition, Lincoln Middle, on 13 October and is accessible to stream on a number of platforms
