‘I Refused to Accept Her Death’

ABLUpdated 2 days Ago5 Mins read1

The film world was shocked yesterday to learn of the death of Fatma Hassona, a 25-year-old Palestinian photojournalist and the subject of Sepideh Farsi’s documentary Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, which is set to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May. Hassona was killed along with her siblings, including her pregnant sister, by an Israeli missile strike that targeted their Gaza apartment building. “I refused to accept it,” Farsi says about first hearing of Hassona’s death. “I thought it was a mistake. I tried reaching out to her, to all of the people whom I knew.” The director later received confirmation of the deaths, though she isn’t sure yet if Fatma’s parents were also among the dead.

It’s a profoundly sad coda to a story already steeped in sadness. “Her assassination adds another layer to this tragedy, but the tragedy was already there,” Farsi says, speaking via Zoom from Paris. She recalls many other times during the past year when she was terrified for Fatma (known to her friends as Fatem) and her family. Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk is constructed of conversations the director and Hassona had over FaceTime and other platforms. They couldn’t meet in person, because the director was unable to travel into Palestine and Fatem had never left Gaza.

Farsi first connected with the young photographer when she decided to tell a story about life during wartime in Gaza. The director, who was born and raised in Iran but moved to France in the 1980s, has made a number of films about war, including her 2021 experimental documentary Every War Is the Same, about the experiences of a Serbian Muslim refugee, and her 2019 drama I Will Cross Tomorrow, about a young man fleeing the fighting in Syria and making his way through Turkey to Greece and Europe. At the time of the October 7 Hamas attacks, Farsi had been traveling to film festivals with her animated, award-winning drama The Siren, about the Iran–Iraq War. “We were all shocked by those first attacks and the loss of Israeli civilians,” she says. But then came Israel’s retaliation, which she describes as “this roller coaster which was never ending.”

As she traveled to different cities in Asia and Europe, Farsi was struck by the emerging dominant narrative. “This is a complex puzzle,” she says. “The Israeli part was represented, the European, Occidental point of view was represented, but the Palestinian point of view was missing.” It reminded her of watching coverage of Iran and seeing how the narrative was shaped by the repressive Islamic Republic regime on the one hand and western media on the other. Farsi had witnessed the Iranian Revolution as a 13-year-old; she had been imprisoned at the age of 16 and had left Iran at 18; her films are currently banned in the country. “As an Iranian dissident, I know what it means to have other people telling your story,” she says.

She traveled to Cairo in hopes of finding a way to cross through Rafah and into Gaza. This proved impossible. “It just so happens that with a French passport, when you’re born in Iran, you get stuck. Neither Egyptians nor Israelis nor Palestinians nor the French will help you,” Farsi says. Then one of her Palestinian connections in Egypt recommended she speak with Hassona. The young photographer had graduated with a degree in multimedia from the University College of Applied Sciences, and she wrote poetry as well.

“At first, the idea was to ask her to send me images from Gaza, which she did,” she says. “But immediately, upon the first video conversation, I said, ‘I’m going to film the conversation. Will you allow me?’” Neither the director nor her subject knew what to expect, but over the course of their first hourlong video chat, with a precarious internet connection cutting in and out, an idea emerged: to build a film out of their talks. After that, they started speaking regularly: “Very quickly, she became the center of my film.”

Farsi was taken with Hassona’s vitality and bravery. Her images from Gaza showed the devastation of war, but also the humanity of those caught in the middle of it. Nor did she flinch from depicting horrific sights. “Sometimes I would ask her, ‘Does it bother you to make photos of shredded bodies?’ And she was like, ‘I think it needs to documented, so I do it, and don’t think about it.’” Hassona’s photos from before October 7 are decidedly different, capturing much of the beauty of life around her. Many of these can still be seen on her Instagram page: Scroll back to 2023 and earlier and you will find images of weddings, graduations, sunsets, children playing in the street, fishermen mending nets, large crowds watching the World Cup. It feels like a different world.

As a woman who had begun her career as a photographer, Farsi came to see a lot of herself in Hassona. “She was my daughter’s age, so there was this generational gap, but we became friends very quickly and it grew into a very deep friendship,” she says. She marveled at the generosity of Fatem, who distributed food to people even though she was going hungry and found time to teach writing courses for children suffering trauma. “I often felt guilty calling her. Here was my life, somebody who’s traveling around the world showing a film in festivals, and she’s stuck in Gaza under bombs.” But Farsi soon understood that by giving Fatem glimpses of her own life, she was allowing this curious young woman to see a world beyond her immediate reality. “As much as she was my eyes in Gaza, I was a window for her to the outside world.”

Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk will premiere in the L’ACID sidebar, a parallel selection of independent projects that occurs during Cannes. The films in L’ACID tend to be lower profile: They don’t have French distribution, and they often don’t have the big sales agents or the high-powered publicists or the stars or the glitzy red carpets. And, given the prestigious Official Competition’s well-known allergy toward documentaries, L’ACID also happens to be where some of the better nonfiction works premiere during Cannes. (One of the best documentaries about the Ukraine war, Maciek Hamela’s In the Rearview, premiered there in 2023.) In a statement shared with Vulture yesterday, L’ACID acknowledged that the conversation around this picture had now changed. “We had watched and programmed a film in which this young woman’s life force was nothing short of miraculous,” it reads. “It is no longer the same film that we will be supporting and presenting in every theater. All of us, filmmakers and viewers, must be worthy of her light.”

Farsi had already planned to organize an exhibition of Hassona’s photographs to coincide with the film’s journey through the festival circuit. That task now gains even greater urgency. Fatem never got to see the finished movie. When Farsi informed her subject and friend that Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk would premiere at Cannes, she hoped that the young woman would travel to France to be present at the screening; Fatem would agree to it only if she could return to Gaza afterward. “I think for her it was still abstract,” Farsi says. “She grew up in Gaza and had never traveled abroad. We’d just sent her the invitation. I asked for a visa for her, and I was thinking, Will we be able to get her out through Rafah? These are all the things that were occupying me until yesterday at noon when I learned the news.”