Iranian director Sepideh Farsi’s Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk seems likely to be the most important film to screen at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. A personal document of life under Israeli siege and bombardment in Gaza, Farsi’s film peers into what life in Gaza is like in 2025 through the eyes of a single Palestinian woman, the 25-year-old Fatima Hassouna, a photographer and citizen journalist. Hassouna was killed by an Israeli missile strike that specifically and precisely targeted her family’s residential apartment on April 16, 2025. Ten other members of her family, including her pregnant sister, were also killed in the strike. The state-authorized family murder happened one day after Cannes selected the film for the parallel ACID program.
Hassouna might have had the brightest smile and biggest eyes in all of Gaza. As observed in Farsi’s film, she seemingly never stops smiling, even as the sounds of air raids and buildings falling distract the director, on the other end of a series of WhatsApp video calls. She is genuinely grateful for her life, and her infectious optimism seems like an impossibility in her position, though she doesn’t let Israeli injustices rob her of her humility and pursuit of happiness. Farsi asks about this too, pointing to the dissonance between the violence she describes — such as when she introduced us to an aunt whose head was found in a separate location from her body — and the beautiful and happy face that delivers the news to her. Hassouna loves to share her photos with Farsi over their video calls.
It’s difficult to identify any other regional cinema with as tilted a cinematic inclination toward documentary over fiction as the cinema of Palestine. Within this strong tradition of documentary filmmaking, a necessarily rich diversity of approaches persists. Farsi, an Iranian banned from her home country for her political films, has made films about Palestinians before, and is no stranger to filming beneath oppressive regimes. Her approach here involves three camera sources: the two screens Hassouna and her chat on, and a third camera to record the screens from an arm’s remove. The calls go in and out as Hassouna struggles to find consistent Internet access, pixelating and dropping at random. She could have chosen a more screen-life approach and actually used the material presented on her screen, but instead, she chose to record the video call bootleg style from another device at about an arm’s length away. It’s like a friend showing a photo on their phone, something that actually happens quite a bit in Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk: the observing friend can’t enter the world of the photo, but they do have a window into the lives of their friend. And that window mobilizes their capacity for empathy.
Carol Mansour’s Aida Returns from last year similarly exists at a stylistic remove between the digital and real worlds, emphasizing both the emotional closeness and real-world separation between those living in Palestine and caring observers who don’t. In that film, Mansour, unable to travel home to Palestine, records a series of video chats between two Lebanese friends (one of whom gets detained at the border) and herself as her friends return the ashes of Aida Abboud Mansour, Carol’s mother and a Nakba survivor, to Yafa, Palestine. The similar styles of Mansour and Farsi’s latest films highlight more than mere creative approaches to practical filmmaking problems; they point to the attempted isolation of Palestine from the rest of the world while still balancing a calling to catalyze empathy. Without the empathetic voyeurism of the way the calls are presented to us, the stakes of this balance would be jeopardized.
A long and deafening week after Hassouna’s death, Cannes released a statement that broadly condemned violence while also removing any perpetrators of violence from the responsibility of having ended her life. They do not use the word “Israel” anywhere in their statement that mourns her death. A more morally appropriate response came from the more than 750 signatories of “artists and cultural players” who signed a statement to “refuse to let our art be an accomplice to the worst” and to use cinema to carry the messages of those who die in indifference. Petitions, of course, are meaningless without action — but hopefully these filmmakers follow up on their statement to create art that pushes against the divisive agendas of the pro-colonial far-right and neoliberal. The art these filmmakers make in response will be, in some way, an extension and reflection of Hassouna’s legacy.
Published as part of Cannes Film Festival 2025 — Dispatch 2.
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