‘Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk' Review: A Stirring Chronicle of a Gaza Journalist Who Was Killed Before Its Cannes Premiere
Farsi takes an unusual visual approach to capturing Hassona, but one that eventually pays dividends. Using one smartphone to film another, the Iranian director creates layers of distance between the audience and her subject — or rather, mimics the actual divide between the two women — during their many WhatsApp video chats. Farsi cannot enter Gaza, and Hassona cannot leave, leaving pixelated calls with delayed audio (owing to Hassona's poor internet connection) as their only way to connect.
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There likely would have been clearer, more traditional options to shoot this footage, between the possibility of screen-recording, or perhaps using Hassona's own DSLR camera, but opting for a lo-fi mise en abyme has a dueling effect. On one hand, it keeps Hassona tragically out of reach, the way she was for Farsi during their year-long conversation, beginning in April 2024. On the other hand, the moments in which Farsi inserts Hassona's photographs on screen become all the more striking. Her pictures of Palestinian death and survival, amid the rubble of bombed buildings, reveals a soulful command of shadow, composition and focus, which stands out in stark contrast to the blurry video chats.
However, the calls themselves are the crux of the movie, and prove immensely alluring despite their poor quality. Hassona, in her broken English, narrates her life and daily circumstances, from her family being starved to the danger of falling bombs as soon as she walks out the door to her dreams of one day escaping Gaza and traveling to Rome. However, despite the death and destruction around her, she delivers each bit of news and information with a radiant grin, attempting to stay positive and laugh off even the most inhumane horrors. During several calls, the audio is interrupted by choppers and drones overhead and bombs falling on neighbors' houses. At one point, she turns her camera to a pillar of smoke nearby, where a residential building had stood just moments earlier.
These heart-wrenching images are given greater political context as Farsi films her laptop in between calls (or while waiting for Hassona to call back, after a call has been dropped) while news videos about Gaza and Israel play on loop. All the while, Farsi remains a subject too — a helpless observer to these events, reduced to a mere shape via her reflection in her smudged computer screen. She asks Hassona for her opinions as well, which the young photographer once again delivers with a smile, even as she unpacks her complex feelings about the larger situation. These details, however, pale in comparison to the seemingly inconsequential anecdotes Hassona narrates about her daily life, each time with a different hijab to match her outfit, or a different pair of shades or glasses.
Hassona is both fashionable and immensely talented (she shares her Arabic poems and songs with Farsi), and the more we see of her over the movie's 110 minutes, the more devastating it becomes that we will never meet her, or never truly get to know her. The proximity of her killing to the Cannes Film Festival likely means that little has changed in the film, except for an added scene and acknowledgment near the end. But even so, Farsi's aesthetic approach — which could have so easily been grating — proves endearing and heartbreaking in equal measure, as a depiction of the exact manner in which a filmmaker got to know her subject intimately before her death. Despite its tragic outcome, the film proves stirring in its capacity for hope against all odds, while also placing on full display the cost of occupation, portraying the full extent of the lives and dreams dashed by war.
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