There’s a moment in Sepideh Farsi’s documentary where Fatma Hassona, the late 25-year-old Gazan photojournalist at its heart, suddenly bursts out laughing during a WhatsApp video call. She’s just described spending the night sheltering from bombs, but what’s really got her giggling is how ridiculous she looks in her cousin’s oversized sunglasses. This is the essence of Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk: not just the horror of war, but the stubborn persistence of everyday life in its shadow.
The film is a devastating yet profoundly human portrait of life under siege in Gaza, made all the more poignant by the tragic fate of its subject, Fatma Hassona. The film, which premiered at Cannes’s parallel ACID program, transcends traditional documentary filmmaking by presenting an intimate, real-time account of resilience in the face of unimaginable horror.
As of May 21, 2025, investigations made by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) counted at least 180 journalists and media workers among the tens of thousands killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023. Fatma Hassona was one of those killed.
Watching those pixelated WhatsApp conversations unfold feels like eavesdropping on something profoundly private yet universally human. The film’s visuals defy traditional wartime documentaries (dozens of them have a war reporter for a subject) and thrive on imperfections — frozen frames, the garbled audio when bombs explode — all of which do not distract but rather pull you deeper into Fatma’s world.
The kind of journalism that Fatma is doing is different from that featured in dozens of documentaries about war reporters, many of whom are journalists assigned by high-flying institutions to head to the front, wherever it is; but for Fatma, the front is home, and the reported casualties are friends and family. Farsi humanizes Fatma as a young woman living in the Gaza Strip, a detail many are denying Palestinians. We can notice how she carefully selects a different colored hijab for each call, how her eyes light up when sharing her latest photographs (not just of ruins, but of children playing hopscotch in their shadow). These aren’t the details of a victim, but of a full, complex person – one who writes love songs, dreams of Italian gelato, and rolls her eyes at Farsi’s terrible Arabic pronunciation.
What makes the film so devastating is its quiet observation of how life continues even as death closes in, a haunting trauma that thousands in the Gaza Strip do not have the luxury to speak about. There’s no dramatic score telling the viewers how to feel when Fatma casually mentions that an aunt’s head was found three streets away from her body. No need for commentary when the camera suddenly swings to show smoke pouring from a building that had been standing minutes before. The power comes from Fatma’s matter-of-fact delivery: the way she explains warplanes are coming to kill them with the same tone someone might use to text a friend, updating them about how their date went.
On August 15, 2025, Fatma learned that the film would screen at Cannes. She and members of her family were killed the following day by an Israeli airstrike. The tragedy of Fatma’s death, coming just after learning her story will be seen by thousands of people, hangs over every frame. But what lingers isn’t the sorrow, it’s the vitality.
In an age of statistics and prime-time war coverage as entertainment, Farsi gives us something radical. Not a symbol or a statistic, but a person. Not a perfect heroine, but a real woman — funny, talented, flawed, and so vibrantly alive that when the postscript announces her death, it feels impossible. Because for 98 minutes, the presence of Fatma laughing, creating, surviving, is felt. And in that alchemy between filmmaker and subject, cinema becomes more than entertainment or even witness. It becomes a reminder to what we owe to each other, and an ode to resilience in the face of almost certain death.
Director, cinematography: Sepideh Farsi
With: Fatma Hassona, Sepideh Farsi
Producers: Sepideh Farsi, Javad Djavahery
Editors: Sepideh Farsi, Farahnaz Sharifi
Music: Cinna Peyghamy
Production company: Rêves d’eau Productions in association with 24images
World sales: Cercamon
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (ACID)
In English, Arabic
Running time: 110 minutes
