Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk — Sepideh Farsi
Fatima Hassouna might have had the brightest smile and biggest eyes in all of Gaza.
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.
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