Julian Borger
The Guardian / August 6, 2025
Fatma Hassona used poetry and photography to record the death and devastation she saw daily. Was she targeted by the IDF? We speak to the director of Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, a film about the journalist
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 Hassona, 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 Hassona’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 anymore.”
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 Hassona 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 Hassona’s age, and she is a cosmopolitan, sophisticated woman who has travelled the world, while Hassona has been restricted to Gaza all her life. Hassona 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 Hassona 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.
Hassona 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, Hassona 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 Hassona 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 Hassona. 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 Hassona’s smile and her instinctive optimism.
Towards the end of the film, Farsi calls Hassona 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 Hassona 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 Hassona 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 Hassona 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 Hassona 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 Hassona’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, Hassona 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 Hassona’s arresting personality has been preserved at the same time, a portrait of a unique individual among the 60,000 dead.
Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk is in UK and Irish cinemas from 22 August
Julian Borger is The Guardian’s senior international correspondent based in London
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Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk review – shattering memorial to Palestinian photojournalist Fatma Hassona
Leslie Felperin
The Guardian / August 20, 2025
Sepideh Farsi’s devastating documentary follows Hassona through a year of video calls before a fate that, though well known, is too bitter to bear.
The rule is this: don’t spoil movies by giving away the ending, even if the events depicted are part of the historical record. But in the case of this devastating documentary, knowing what’s coming at the end is a radical enhancement, a chilling message from the movie’s future that makes you read everything differently.
So here’s the big reveal: Fatma Hassona, the young Palestinian woman in this film, to whom director Sepideh Farsi talks to via video calls over nearly a year, is now dead, killed on 16 April by an Israeli airstrike along with several members of her family. In fact, the last we see of Hassona is her being told by Farsi that the film we’ve just been watching will be shown at the Cannes film festival. This prompts a conversation about whether Hassona will attend the premiere (“Of course!” she says, optimistically) and perhaps use that trip as an opportunity to leave Gaza for good. She demurs politely, insisting that Gaza is her home even if everything and everyone is destroyed.
This last conversation resonates so deeply because Gaza is indeed being ground down to dust. But it’s the audacious austerity of Farsi’s film-making that really makes the material sing. As that cheery last conversation ends with a humdrum discussion of passports and a promise, impossible to keep, to talk again soon, the screen fades to black and bare, factual subtitles reveal Hassona’s fate. There’s no soaring string soundtrack, no final on-the-nose irony, just the palpable absence of Hassona’s almost always smiling face, her laughter, and her irrepressible optimism.
The film itself consists almost entirely of these often halting video-call conversations, interspersed with news reports that Farsi films of live broadcasts – and, most importantly, the digital photographs Hassona took herself nearly every day. She had aspirations to become a professional photographer, and clearly she had an eye. The images show Palestinians in Gaza quietly getting on with life against the frayed and collapsing backdrop of the city.
One of the last clips is a long drive, presumably on a motorcycle or bicycle, through streets full of ruins, with kids playing, dust-covered cars everywhere, all bedded by snatches of Hassona’s earlier conversations. The one that will really get you is the call back to the time when she tried to assuage Farsi’s feelings of inadequacy for not being able to help Hassona and her community more. “It’s enough that you’re listening to me,” Hassona says. “I’m so glad to be here and I’m so glad that you are beside me.” We might question whether it is enough that this film memorialises her, but her memory will be a blessing.
Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk is in UK and Irish cinemas from 22 August
