A Uncooked, Devastating Video Diary of Life In Wartime

A day after Sepideh Farsi’s Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Stroll was chosen for the 2025 Cannes Movie Pageant, its topic was killed in an Israeli airstrike together with six different members of her household. Fatma Hassona was 24, an aspiring photojournalist whose gorgeous compositions of life in wartime provide the movie with a useful context. The documentary is an prolonged video diary of an unusual friendship; Sepideh is a longtime Iranian filmmaker, Fatma a burgeoning artist who desires of leaving the confines of a ravaged metropolis.

Although Sepideh had completed enhancing earlier than information of Fatma’s dying, the movie is brimming with a nauseating foreshadowing of sure dying. Every of their conversations is shot horizontally, with Sepideh filming their video name conversations with a secondary telephone. The impact is without delay distancing and intimate. It accentuates the pure separation between filmmaker and topic whereas protecting them on a stage enjoying discipline; Sepideh by no means movies with a “skilled” digital camera, giving all of their conversations the texture of two mates catching up within the worst of circumstances.

But Fatma, who had already misplaced 13 relations by the point their correspondence started, in early 2024, exudes heat and humor. Her smile is outstanding, her inexperienced eyes piercing even the pixelated picture of a poor web connection. At a number of factors throughout their early conversations, Fatma insists on a bewildering optimism. Because the movie continues, her hope dims, however by no means sufficient that she will’t think about the prospect of strolling the purple carpet with Sepideh within the south of France.

Put Your Soul On Your Hand And Stroll Is A Beautiful Work Of Intimate Non-Fiction

The selection to movie conversations by way of telephone is becoming, contemplating the way in which during which we have consumed the genocide in Gaza in the exact same manner. By way of a collection of cell telephones, there’s a delicate subversion of the inurement of too many photographs. The extra we see, the extra desensitized we turn into to the severing of limbs, the destruction of hospitals, the blockade of meals and primary items. It additionally provides new life to the strain of a tenuous connection. With every momentary break in video name or drop in audio, the likelihood looms that this can be the final of Fatma that we hear.

And she or he is a wondrous topic. An artist herself, Fatma additionally understands the ability of image-making. At instances, her photographs are direct rebukes of persistent narratives that come from the Israeli navy. Provided that she is surrounded by bombardment, it is a on condition that the majority of their dialog is dominated by the dropping of bombs. But, Fatma exemplifies her folks’s persistence. “I really feel proud” to be Palestinian, she says within the spring of 2024, “they cannot defeat us!“

Between their conversations, Sepideh consists of information footage, additionally captured via her cellphone. Talks of ceasefire agreements, exchanges of hostages, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s barking about Israeli safety tie collectively personal talks between filmmaker and topic about life, about meals, about desires of escape. This unusual picture of survival accentuates the devastation of loss. Fatma is only one sufferer; what different worlds have we misplaced with every new dying?

Sepideh Farsi started her profession photographing protests inside Iran, and so the 2 share an implicit connection past the apparent. Sepideh may symbolize a model of the individual Fatma may have been had she certainly survived. In these two girls, a delicate portrait of political resistance is painted amidst the rubble. The movie’s title comes from a late dialog during which Fatma tries to relay, in English, what it looks like to easily be exterior at such a second. “You place your soul in your hand and stroll,” she says. Her charmingly, barely off English is poetic — and certainly, she additionally wrote poetry — suggesting how susceptible it’s to actually dwell and breathe whereas merely present as a perceived enemy. And our souls might by no means be the identical.

Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Stroll is now enjoying in restricted theaters.