Sepideh Farsi's documentary "Put Your Soul on Your Hands and Walk" follows 25-year-old Gaza photojournalist Fatma Hassona about a woman who keeps bombing, which makes its environment particularly shocking. On April 16, 2025, the day after the film festival Cannes Film Festival selection, Hassona was killed in an air raid in Israel, turning the film into an epitaph of the film, too short.
Farsi takes an unusual visual approach to capturing Hassona, but ultimately brings benefits. During many WhatsApp video chats, using one smartphone to shoot another, the Iranian director creates distances between the audience and her subject, or mimics the actual gap between two women. Porsey cannot enter Gaza, Hassona cannot leave, leaving pixelated calls and delayed audio (due to Hassona's poor internet connection) is the only way to connect.
Between the possibility of screen recording or the use of Hassona's own DSLR camera, there may be a clearer traditional choice to shoot this material, but Lo-Fi is chosen mise en abyme Have duel effect. On the one hand, it makes Hassona miserably out of reach, just like the conversation in April 2024 that began in April 2024, her way. Her photos of Palestinian death and survival reveal a affectionate shadow, composition and focus command in the ruins of bombed buildings, in stark contrast to the vague video chat.
However, these calls themselves are the crux of the movie, and despite its poor quality, they prove that the crux of the movie is very big. Hassona tells her life and daily situations in broken English, from starving her family to the danger of falling bombs, once she walks out of a dream and one day escapes Gaza and heads to Rome. However, despite the death and destruction around her, she showed a bright smile to convey every little news and information, trying to keep a positive attitude and laugh at even the most inhuman horror. During several phone calls, the audio was broken overhead by choppers and drones, and the bombs landed on the neighbor's house. Once, she turned her camera to a nearby smoke post where a residential building stood just a moment ago.
These heartbreaking images will gain a greater political background when they are between her laptops (or after waiting for Hassona to make a call), while news videos about Gaza and Israel are played. All along, Porsey remains a subject-the helpless observers of these events, reduced to shape only by reflections on smudged computer screens. She also made her own comments to Hassona, and the young photographer once again conveyed her opinions with a smile, even as she opened up complex feelings about the bigger situation. However, compared to Hassona's seemingly insignificant anecdotes, these details are pale, each involving her daily life, each time with a different turban to match her clothes, or a different pair of shadows or glasses.
Hassona is both stylish and talented (she shares her Arabic poetry and songs with Farsi), and the more we think of her in the 110 minutes of the movie, the more we will never see her, or we will never really know her. The distance she killed the Cannes Film Festival could mean that there was little change in the film, except for a nearby scene and acknowledgement. But even so, Porsey’s aesthetic approach (which could have been easily harsh) proves cute and heartbreaking on the same scale, a description of the exact way the filmmaker knew her subject intimately before his death. Despite the tragic result, the film proves that its ability to hope arouses people’s abilities in various dilemmas, while also fully displaying the cost of career, depicting the full scope of life and dreams that were shattered by war.