“The whole lot occurs for a motive!” beams Fatma Hassona throughout one of her early conversations with exiled Iranian filmmaker Sepideh Farsi. It’s April 2024 and the rosy-cheeked Palestinian photojournalist is explaining the infrastructural and human devastation inflicted by Israel’s bombardment of her native enclave of Gaza. Months later, Hassona’s face has shrunk, her pores and skin paled and coarsened from lack of recent water and diet, and in between her attribute smiles and laughter her expression goes clean as she contemplates the still-ongoing bombardment: “There isn’t any motive for something they do.”
All through Farsi’s Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Stroll, handheld smartphone footage captures screens displaying Hassona, who was killed in a focused strike by Israel simply previous to the movie’s Cannes premiere, conversing with the filmmaker. These conversations are juxtaposed with woozy close-ups on tv units broadcasting information in regards to the Gaza battle—specifically Hamas and Israel’s repeat failures to dealer a ceasefire, every holding out on calls for that their leaders deem politically unacceptable, and Western allies’ stunning complacency as Israel defies worldwide humanitarian legislation beneath the banner of counterinsurgency.
Hassona’s spectral, hijab-clad visage haunts these nauseating volleys of info, so typically smiling as she discusses the compounding struggling on the bottom. She evinces solely generalized consciousness of the bigger political struggles shaping and threatening her life, focusing as an alternative on her household and group as she wages her personal wrestle in opposition to despair—a wrestle during which smiles, laughter, artwork, and religion are her chosen weapons of resistance.
The movie’s title comes from a description by Hassona, additionally a gifted poet, of the existential terror felt by residents within the streets of Gaza, the place bombs appear to fall at random, taking buddies, household, and neighbors with them. Her pictures and poems, exhibited in haunting montages all through—and the movie’s solely lucid, high-definition pictures—doc huge landscapes of city smash presided over by drones, snipers, and different faceless bringers of dying. But additionally they comprise a playfulness that defies the looming pall of despair, emphasizing youngsters’s video games and creativeness whilst they try to make peace with the abyss: “I lied after I mentioned that dying was hideous; dying is scrumptious, but none of us has ever tasted its taste.”
Farsi, a secular feminist residing within the West, is acutely conscious of the bodily and cultural separation between herself and her topic in addition to the layers of mediation required for her entry. In components, she calmly presses Hassona on delicate matters: hijab enforcement and conservative Islam, October 7, Hamas, and extra. Hassona’s statements on every aren’t fairly endorsements and not fairly condemnations; Farsi, although she often notes her personal skepticism, doesn’t decide however presents them actually as half of a full human portrait.
Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Stroll was supposed by Farsi as a reflection on obstacles and bridges within the age of display omnipresence. However within the wake of Hassona’s dying, it additionally stands as a shifting monument to this younger lady and numerous others like her—lovers of life who refused to be quiet as they had been swept into the dehumanizing equipment of battle.
Rating:
Director: Sepideh Farsi Distributor: Kino Lorber Working Time: 110 min Ranking: NR 12 months: 2025
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