Unable to film in Palestine, Iranian filmmaker Sepideh Farsi made an online acquaintance with late Palestinian photojournalist Fatima Hassouna. This haunting yet humanising documentary explores their conversations and the ground realities in an active warzone.
A shot-on-video call documentary accompanying a livestreamed dystopia. As the violence and starvation in Gaza have literally been livestreamed to us every single day now, there’s something unabashedly voyeuristic about watching a documentary like Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk. More so when it plays out entirely as a video call between a long-exiled Iranian filmmaker and a Palestinian photojournalist, Fatima Hassouna, in her mid-20s. Hassouna was killed with her entire family in an Israeli airstrike just days after the film was selected to be screened at Cannes. When she set out to document the realities of the Israeli military campaigns in Gaza, Director Sepideh Farsi may not have intended to film Fatima Hassouna’s obituary. Occasionally, Farsi’s own perceptions seep into the conversational style of the film, be it her complaints with conservative Islam (as she quizzes Hassouna on the age since she started wearing a hijab) or her own upbringing within a progressive liberal Iranian family that had to evade their authoritarian homeland. But these are just minor distractions as the rest of the documentary emerges as a strong work of journalistic filmmaking, and a sensitively-told story of a young woman navigating her 20s and the human rights crises around her.
Thankfully, Farsi’s blurrily captured, hauntingly real end-product doesn’t play out as an exploitative plea for sympathy. By presenting unadulterated snippets from the video calls (sans music), the documentary provides enough agency to Hassouna to express her dreams, desires, and depression (or “dispression” as she likes to call it). In one conversation, she smilingly misses the joys of having a chocolate or a bag of chips, while in another, she gives her take on Hamas’s leadership and Israel’s flimsy ceasefire deals. Multiple moments also find her numbingly describing how her internet might be slow and shoddy as her neighbor’s house is bombed in real time.
It’s a hard-hitting watch like any piece of reportage on Palestine, but Farsi’s best strength here is that she doesn’t showcase much of her own filmmaking or editing genius. In strictly visual terms, it’s a simple final cut with limited post-production. Tweaking or overlays are consciously avoided for the faltering voices on video calls, dodgy network connections, sudden transitions to black screens, and deafening silences. What might just come off as amateur new-age filmmaking turns out to be a strong case study of Gazan youth. A powerful scene from early on in the doc finds Hassouna expressing pride in her countryfolk, admiring their bravery in these testing times and putting faith in a final ceasefire that can end occupation in Gaza and around the world. Farsi wishes the same, albeit thinking it is Utopian thinking amidst the larger geopolitical circus. Still, in keeping such moments in her final edits, she paints Hassouna as a Palestinian survivor rather than just a helpless victim in crisis. Interspersed moments of news coverage remind us time and again of the hellish torture that Gazans are going through. Still, the lens hardly ever looks down upon them as voiceless casualties or measurable statistics. In that sense, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk seems to mirror Hassouna’s own photographs (some of which feature in the film), capturing Palestinian civilians clearing up debris after airstrikes and children smiling amidst the rubble.
This sensitive portrait of Palestinian photojournalist Fatima Hassouna tones down filmmaking gimmicks and exploitative trauma narratives in favor of unadulterated ground realities and human conversations.
