Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk

"Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk" is a powerful, gripping and illuminating documentary about Fatma Hassouna, a 24-year-old Palestinian who lived in war torn Gaza before dying from an Israeli airstrike in April 2025. Director Sepideh Farsi communicates with her through FaceTime and WhatsApp starting in April 2024 while calling her periodically to check in on her and to let her talk about and show the horrors of the war in Gaza. There are bombings every day and food shortages, but Fatma remains hopeful that the war will end soon. Sepideh isn't so optimistic, though. Most of the questions that she asks her are fine, but there's one that could've been omitted because it has an obvious answer: to compare her experiences in quarantine during the pandemic to her experiences trapped in Gaza during the war. Besides the occasional jump to news footage documenting the Israel-Hamas war, what makes the doc so harrowing is how Farsi’s conversations with Fatma highlight the immense psychological toll on people like her and her family as they’re forced to endure famine and destruction. Fatma would always put on a persevering smile during her video chats in the face of never-ending peril. A smile that provides small instances of levity within such a heavy documentation. Yet, at one point, Fatma says how just the sound of airplanes whirling in the sky exacerbates her depression. It's not surprising that she had internet access before and was happier. That said, Fatma does manage to briefly discuss her battles with depression, so this documentary serves as a very intimate diary as well as an alarming, emotionally devastating human rights exposé. The fact that Fatma Hassona never got to see the final film which made its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival a month after her tragic demise is bound to make viewers more saddened and enraged. But through the film, Sepideh Farsi still keeps her memory alive. "Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk" is not just one of the year’s best movies, but one of its most essential ones.

Filmmaking under fire can’t be easy. In many respects, it’s akin to the task undertaken by war correspondents when reporting from combat zones. But, for all the difficulties associated with efforts like this, coverage of these stories certainly serves a valuable purpose in letting the world know what’s transpiring in such heated conflicts. That’s obviously the intent underlying this release from writer-director Sepideh Farsi, an account of the relentlessly protracted battle zone horrors that have been playing out in Gaza against the Palestinian people by Israeli Defense Forces. The filmmaker had originally hoped to cover the story from inside Gaza, but border closures and prohibitions against outsiders being allowed into the occupied territory kept her from entering Palestine. An alternate approach was thus needed. So, after evaluating her options, the director devised an inventive solution, telling her story through a series of cell phone conversations between her and 24-year-old Fatma Hassona, an aspiring journalist/photographer struggling to survive under the harsh conditions of her homeland’s onslaught. The dialogues between Farsi and Hassona cover a wide array of topics, ranging from coping with the logistical challenges of everyday life to the emotional toll of living under the constant threat of military annihilation to the ironically unexpected (albeit undeniably frustrated) sense of hope that pervades Fatma’s outlook for the future. A rollercoaster of emotions ensues as displays of heartbreak and hopefulness emerge, faithfully presented as they occurred – phone connection glitches, sound quality issues and all. However, as much as there is to be said for this documentary’s sincere commitment to authenticity, it could stand to have been cleaned up in the final cut. The flow of some of the content becomes rambling and repetitious, and there’s plenty of extraneous material unrelated to the cell phone conversations that easily could have been eliminated. While the effort involved in amassing the footage that was collected is indeed commendable in light of the inherent difficulties involved, the filmmaker’s failure to make the material more coherent, less redundant and better focused only serves to undermine the clarity and importance of the message that the picture is seeking to convey. As someone who lived through the tyranny inflicted against her in her Iranian homeland, Farsi is herself no stranger to the kinds of ordeals that her subject faces, and the filmmaker valiantly attempts to bring those circumstances to light, an effort that earned this offering a Cannes Film Festival nomination and the National Board of Review’s Freedom of Expression Award. Nevertheless, as laudable as this work strives to be, it could have been more effective if it had told its story with more of an eye toward informing than with simply presenting the unfiltered raw material for its own sake. Fatma and the people of Palestine deserve better.