In Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, Iranian-born director Sepideh Farsi and Palestinian photographer Fatma Hassona craft a documentary of haunting immediacy. Through more than 200 days of video calls, the film charts Hassona’s life under siege in Gaza from 2024–25, capturing the everyday resilience of a young photojournalist who insists on maintaining her ideals even as bombs fall and hope frays.
Tune into Inside the Arthouse to hear Farsi discuss her revolutionary project with co-hosts Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge ahead of its impending run at the Laemmle Monica and Glendale theaters beginning November 14th.
The filmmaking is itself quietly radical. Farsi, barred from Gaza, connects remotely via smartphone, creating a frame-within-a-frame aesthetic that reflects the imposed distances and filtered visibility of war. Critics have noted the film’s stripped-back style (mostly buffer-laden FaceTime footage, interrupted calls, and pixelated images) that tastes of unmediated reality and sorrow, making the viewer feel even more intimately involved in the events being depicted on the screen.
Through it all, Fatma Hassona emerges as the film’s beating heart: always cheerful, even when surrounded by rubble, shortage, and grief. She shares her world with a quiet strength and surprising humor, discussing photography, music, and the simple joy of eating chips while bombs echo outside. Yet in April 2025, mere weeks after the film was selected for Cannes’ prestigious ACID sidebar, Hassona and several members of her family were killed in an Israeli airstrike. Her death casts a permanent shadow over the documentary, leaving behind a chilling statement about what it costs to look.
For all its opportunity, the documentary refuses easy distance or objective coldness. Instead, it lingers on the interruptions—the frozen frames, the dropped calls, the unedited glitches—so that viewers can feel even a shred of what it means to live under siege. It asks what form seeing takes when the camera, the connection, and even one’s body are all vulnerable. And though the film documents devastation, it refuses to devolve into either reductionism or the fetishization of victimhood; after all, Hassona is not a number. She is smiling, stubbornly alive, a human face among many, and the film dutifully preserves her voice.
For viewers drawn to documentaries that fuse intimacy and urgency, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk stands as a testament not just to loss, but to persistence. Perhaps its greatest superpower lies in juxtaposing life’s ordinary moments—calls about electricity, photos shared with friends abroad—with the extraordinary circumstances that turn them into daring acts.
“A moving monument to this young woman and countless others like her—lovers of life who refused to be quiet as they were swept into the dehumanizing machinery of war.” – Eli Friedberg, Slant Magazine
“Farsi’s film does not necessarily expose the morbid reality of Gaza as much as it reveals what it would be like to survive through it.” – Akash Despande, High On Films
“[The film] exudes character from every frame.” – Landon Defever, In Session Film