21/10/2025 - Iranian director Sepideh Farsi transforms her video calls with photo-journalist Fatma Hassona into a precious and heartbreaking testimony of daily life in Gaza under bombardment

For a year, starting in April 2024, Iranian director Sepideh Farsi remained in contact with 24-year old Palestinian photo-journalist Fatma Hassona with the intention of documenting daily life in Gaza under bombardment, through the woman’s eyes and voice. Their many video calls became the skeleton of a powerful documentary, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk.

On 15 April 2025, Farsi tells Hassona that the film has been selected to world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, in the ACID section. The two women rejoice, both are invited to the Croisette, they will finally be able to meet in person. The next day, on 16 April, an Israeli missile hit Fatma Hassona’s house, killing at once her and six members of her family.

Now landing on the screens of the 20th Rome Film Fest, in the Special Screenings section, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk is one of those films that throws reality in your face and leaves you speechless, even after the lights of the cinema have turned back on. The director, who after being imprisoned as a dissident for 16 years has left Iran forever and now lives in Paris, met Fatma online: “She became my eyes in Gaza. And I became a link between her and the rest of the world.”

For the entire film, we see Fatma’s face on a smartphone screen. Always smiling, her eyes shining, she is a proud, strong young woman who feels she can do something important for her people under siege: to document, day after day, the war on the Strip and show it to the world. The video calls are often disrupted, the connection comes and goes, the images aren’t perfect; in the background, the constant sound of bombardment. As soon as she can, Fatma goes down to the street and takes pictures. As she says, she puts her soul on her hand and walks, looking for life amongst so much destruction. Through her photographs and videos, we enter a tormented land.

With each passing month, the extension of the war starts to mark Fatma. She is tired, weaker, she no longer manages to focus on things. She dreams of a normal life, of eating chocolate, of traveling. And yet, her smile is always there, she doesn’t lose hope. The two women get ever closer, even if thousands of kilometers stand between them. Their conversations are affectionate and, at the same time, rich in information and slices of everyday life. In her extreme simplicity (two faces on a smartphone, photographs of Fatma, some news clips), Sepideh Farsi delivers a precious and heartbreaking testimony of the extermination taking place on the Gaza Strip, but also of the strength and light of people who no longer have anything but their humanity.

Since 7 October 2023 - as a title card reminds us at the end of the film - at least 211 journalists and media professionals have been killed in Gaza by the Israeli army.

Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk was produced by French outfits Rêves d'Eau Productions and 24Images. International sales are handled by Cercamon (Dubai).

(Translated from Italian)