Israel has sought to pursue its campaign of annihilation against Gaza and its people behind closed doors. More than 170 Palestinian journalists have been killed so far, and no outside reporters or cameras are allowed in.
The effects of this policy of concealment – which the Guardian managed to pierce this week with a shocking aerial photograph that made the front page – are to ensure that the outside world only catches sight of Gaza’s horrors in small fragments, and to stifle empathy for those trapped inside by hiding them from view, obscuring their humanity. But a new documentary film, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, seeks to open a window to the unfathomable suffering inside Gaza.
It focuses on the life of a single young Palestinian woman named Fatma Hassouna, known as Fatem to those close to her. She is 24 years old when we meet her, and has such a broad smile and enthusiasm for life that she compels attention from her first appearance, a few minutes into the film.
We see Hassouna’s life through the screen of a mobile phone belonging to the director, Sepideh Farsi, and most of the film is made up of the conversations between these two women as they develop an increasingly strong personal bond over the course of a year.
The director knows all about conflict and oppression. Farsi is Iranian-born and was a teenager at the time of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. When she was 16 she was imprisoned by the Islamic Republic regime, and she left the country for good two years later, settling in France. She was on tour with her film The Siren, a feature-length animation about the Iran-Iraq war, when the Gaza conflict erupted in October 2023. As the civilian death toll mounted, she found herself unable just to sit on the sidelines, watching endless debates that did nothing to stop the slaughter.
“The common denominator was that there was never the Palestinian voice there,” Farsi says. “We had different points of views: the American, the European, the Egyptian, the Israeli, but never the Palestinian. It started really bothering me, and at some point I couldn’t live with it any more.”
In spring last year she flew to Cairo with the idea that she could somehow find a way across the Gaza border to film the war firsthand. That quickly proved a naive and futile mission, so she began filming Gazan refugees in Egypt. One of them suggested to Farsi that if she wanted to talk to someone inside, he could put her in touch with his friend Fatma in the al-Tuffah neighbourhood of Gaza City.
We first see Hassouna the way Farsi meets her, on her little phone screen, materialising with green hijab, big glasses and her broad white strip of a smile. They clearly delight in each other’s presence from the outset.
“From the first call, I felt that she was someone very special, and that something clicked between the two of us immediately,” Farsi says. “As soon as we connected, I would be smiling or laughing, and she was the same on her side.”
There had been no guarantee the two would get along. Farsi is significantly older, with a daughter Hassouna’s age, and she is a cosmopolitan, sophisticated woman who has travelled the world, while Hassouna has been restricted to Gaza all her life. Hassouna is devout while Farsi is profoundly sceptical of any religious talk and challenges her new young friend over what kind of god would allow innocent people to suffer so painfully.
However there is far more that draws them together, in ways that are harder to define. “She had this energy, this shining thing. She was solar,” Farsi says. “That’s the adjective that fits her. Her natural smile. There was this mutual fascination, sorority, comradeship – a mixture of all of these things – and we were happy as soon as we connected.”
Farsi makes her phone a portal through which Hassouna recounts her story and the tragedy of Gaza. She talks about her family and introduces her shy brothers to Farsi. She has already made herself a photographer and poet by the time they meet, and Farsi coaches her into being a film-maker and to send out video of the ruination around her.
Hassouna is supremely, naturally talented. Her pictures capture the everyday effort of her neighbours trying to survive in the rubble, while her use of language – in her poems and in conversation – is every bit as evocative. The film’s title is taken from her passing description of what it is like to venture outside: “Every second you go out in the street, you put your soul on your hands and walk.”
In another conversation, struggling to make sense of what is happening, Hassouna asks: “We live a very simple life, and they want to take this simple life from us. Why? I’m 24 and I don’t have any of the things that I want. Because every time you reach what you want, there’s a wall. They put up a wall.”
The film should not work. It is determinedly rudimentary, filmed largely on one phone pointed at another. The image of Hassouna sometimes freezes and buffers as the internet connection ebbs and flows. But these glitches draw us in and make us experience the precariousness of their connection.
“That’s why I decided to keep this low resolution and not to use a regular camera,” Farsi explains. “I wanted it to be very low-key technically, to match the connection problems with her, to match the disparity of life here and there.” She had originally attempted a cleanly edited version with all the disconnections cut out. “It was lacking soul. It didn’t breathe. So we put it back in – this brokenness of image and sound.”
The sweetness of the relationship at the core of the film is made bittersweet by the constant threat of death around Hassouna. Every so often she reports the death of relatives, or neighbours whose eviscerated homes she points to out of her window. It feels like the encircling darkness is in a direct struggle with Hassouna’s smile and her instinctive optimism.
Anyone who does not want to know which triumphs in the end should stop reading here.
Towards the end of the film, Farsi calls Hassouna to give her the happy news that the film has been selected to be screened at Cannes. They excitedly talk about Farsi obtaining a French visa that might allow Hassouna to get out of Gaza temporarily to attend the festival. While they are talking, the young Palestinian sends the film-maker a photo of her passport.
That was 14 April this year. The next day, a Tuesday, Farsi could not get through to Gaza to give Hassouna an update on preparations. “So I said, ‘OK, we’ll do it on Wednesday,” the director recalls. “On Wednesday, I was working on the film on my computer with my phone beside me, and all of a sudden I saw a photo pop up. I opened the notification and saw her photo with a caption saying she had been killed. I didn’t believe it. I started calling her frantically, and then called a mutual friend, the one who introduced us, and he confirmed it was true.”
In the middle of the night, two missiles fired by an Israeli drone had pierced the roof of her building and burrowed through before detonating, one of them exploding in the family’s second floor apartment, the other just below. Fatma Hassouna was killed along with her three brothers and two sisters. Her father died later of his wounds leaving her mother, Lubna, as the sole survivor.
The investigative group Forensic Architecture studied the missile strike and declared it a targeted strike aimed at Hassouna for her work as a journalist and witness. Farsi has no doubt. “She was targeted by the IDF,” she says. “There were two missiles dropped by a drone on her house. It means they found out where she was living, planned a drone with missiles to go through three storeys of that building and explode on the second floor. It’s amazingly well planned in order to eliminate somebody who just does photography.
“I still can’t believe it,” Farsi says, speaking from Bogotá, where she is touring with the film, which is now Hassouna’s legacy. “It’s three months now, a bit more, and it’s still quite unbelievable. For me, she is somewhere out there and I believe I will meet her someday.”
In their conversations, Hassouna talked about all the places in the world she dreamed of seeing, while insisting she would always return home to Gaza. Shortly before she died, she told Farsi: “I have the idea that I must keep going and I must document everything, to be part of this story, to be me!”
She imagined passing on her experiences to her children, but instead they have been captured for a cinematic audience, and Hassouna’s arresting personality has been preserved at the same time, a portrait of a unique individual among the 60,000 dead.
