EIFF 2025: Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk
Sepideh Farsi's heartbreaking documentary depicts life in Gaza during Israel's brutal military campaign through the eyes of photojournalist Fatima Hassouna, who was subsequently killed in an Israeli airstrike
Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk is a primary source for history, a portrait of resistance amid Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine. It is a direct line of communication from hell: it features a year’s worth of WhatsApp video calls between the sweet, bright, fearless, and now martyred, young Palestinian photojournalist Fatima Hassouna, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike after the film was completed, and Iranian director Sepideh Farsi. The documentary holds a harrowing Schrödinger’s Cat-state of paradox: we are watching a young woman we now know is dead passionately assert her life.
The film is a record of Fatima’s indomitable spirit. She greets Sepideh with a beaming smile in every call, as she narrates the decimation of her hometown of Rafah. Such resilience seems simply impossible. At points, Fatima is the one soothing Sepideh’s distress upon a new update of devastation: “It’s OK, it’s OK,” to which Sepideh replies, “No it’s not OK!” Fatima's calm battle cry, “Whatever they do to us, however they try to destroy us, or even if they kill us… They can’t defeat us,” is given material form in her expansive photography that makes up significant sequences in the film. These photos reflect her dogged intention to “find some life in this world amongst the death”: the irrepressible light of kids smiling, heartening movement on bikes amid debris. But the chilling scenes linger: crying toddlers with their barren pots awaiting food; a burnt-up hospital; a dismembered hand in rubble, with fingers hauntingly still flexed in a grip.
Inured, Fatima notes how her relative’s severed head was discovered on the street. Murder is the weather she has acclimatised to: through-the-night airstrikes from F-16s, a daytime sky full of Apache helicopters, and paper evacuation orders dropping from above – a prelude to further bombing. In her recording, you can hear the ever-present, terrorising thrum of planes hovering and see the mushroom clouds ahead. Phosphorus is now part of the atmosphere, and drinking water is contaminated. Every little dignity of identity has been purposefully extracted: Fatima laments the Israeli cultural rewrite of Palestine – the imposition of the Shekel, the appropriation of hummus and falafel. “They want to steal everything, from the tiny things, to the huge things,” she says. Overwhelmed with fatigue, Fatima tells of starvation, including her own, but resolves that “this time will pass” – just brain-breaking tragedy.
The dissonance between interviewer and interviewee is their respective conditions of normalcy. There are points of relation – the Iranian regime’s infringement on citizens’ rights is no faint asterisk – but Fatima’s experience seems ultimately incomparable in its total entrapment. As Sepideh dials in from varying destinations (Paris, Morocco, Rome, the beach), Fatima vicariously clings to these channels of a different kind of living. The final correspondence between the two women, evidence of their genuine bond, is a provisional plan to finally meet in person: at an amusement park, as per Fatima’s shatteringly simple dream, or at the Cannes Film Festival to witness this very film’s celebration. This, of course, is an unrealised plan and a torched dream. This is imperialist warfare and the victims of its multivalent evil. This is the ravaging of sense as we watch history on loop.
Journalistic detachment fails me here. There has to be a terrific hole in all of us where this horror has to live.
Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk has its UK premiere at EIFF on 19 & 20 Aug, and is released in the UK on 22 Aug by Dogwoof; certificate TBC