Sepideh Farsi’s intimate documentary shows the friendship she developed with a young Palestinian woman in Gaza during Israel’s invasion.
Trying to describe the suffering of civilians in war tends to fall short—because abstractions, statistics, and an overview of generalities, creates distance in our minds, despite the degree of accuracy in reporting. We are individuals, and all human experience is such. Therefore we must see events on that level, and imagine being a person in the midst of all this, to genuinely understand. Iranian filmmaker Sepideh Farsi gives us access to that experience, in a documentary about her friendship with a young Palestinian woman in Gaza entitled Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk.
Farsi is herself an exile from Iran, having fled the repressive theocracy there many years ago, and now living and making movies in Paris. She first tells of how she wanted to go to Gaza after Israel’s government invaded in response to the terrorist attacks in October of 2023. Arriving in Cairo, she found that all access was blocked. But it so happened that a friend gave her the contact info for Fatima Hassouna, a 24-year-old woman in northeast Gaza. She was taking pictures of life there, and aspired to be a photojournalist. They were able to talk face-to-face via WhatsApp, and became friends.
Internet connections in Gaza are shaky and unreliable, as you can imagine. Farsi filmed their interactions to include most of the glitches when the signal would disconnect and she’d have to call back, which happened very often, and also the variable quality of the sound, which would go in and out a lot. I found it necessary to turn on closed captioning in order to better follow the conversations, which are mostly in English. In the course of the film, Fatima and her family are forced to evacuate south to various locations by the military, and different places are more or less difficult to connect with. You might think this would make watching the film harder, but Farsi’s adherence to the true conditions involved conveys the tentative nature of day-to-day survival in Gaza, and the fragility of trying to stay in touch with the outside world in some way.
Fatima, we discover, is a remarkable person. Most of the time she is smiling with joy at just being able to talk with Farsi. Her cheerfulness is striking, and even Farsi, from the safety of wherever she’s calling from—Paris, Florence, Canada, or Morocco—is astounded by Fatima’s positive attitude. She has a kind of equanimity, even when mentioning the deaths of loved ones, that is hard to fathom. She says it’s because of her faith, love of her people, and lack of fear. At one point she explains that she has nothing to lose, and is thus free from worry. Later in the film, she’s not as focused in her speech, because the starvation being imposed by Israel has visibly weakened her.
In between the conversations, which happen over most of 2024, Farsi shows us brief news reports about the devastation, and a selection of Hassouna’s eloquent photographs of life amid the ruins. A few times, Fatima points her phone out the window so we can see how all the buildings have been reduced to rubble. The title of the movie is from her words describing the danger one feels from just going outside. In order to do so, she says, you have to “put your soul on your hand and walk.” We clearly see this reality, from the point of view of someone living through it.
Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, simply and without a filter, shows us the truth about one of our century’s greatest crimes, and the courage and perseverance of one gentle soul.
