“Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk” had already been hailed in Cannes by Jury President Juliette Binoche, who wanted above all to remember her, the photographer Fatima Hassouna, killed with her family by an Israeli raid. Sepideh Farsi’s documentary, now at the 20th Rome Film Festival, offers us a profound, unprecedented and indispensable look at the great tragedy of our time.

“Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk” – The plot

“Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk” is another fundamental chapter of that cinematography that has taken on the task of telling us about the massacre that has been bloodied in Gaza since October 7th, destroying a people, their future, their hopes. After “The Voice of Hind Rajab” by Kaouther ben Hania, symbol of the last Venice Film Festival, this documentary by Sepideh Farsi arrives at the Rome Film Festival from Cannes, a necessary, very powerful, but above all incredibly engaging work. This despite its quite particular, indeed unique, aesthetic nature. It all began in April 2024, when the Iranian director, forced to leave her country due to the regime’s persecution, came into contact with her, with Fatima Hassouna, a journalist who began to become her source for understanding what was happening, a prisoner together with every other human being of the terrifying siege of Gaza. Those video calls, phone calls, however unstable, are a precious, priceless human contact between two women who quickly also become two friends, two souls in symbiosis.

They want to continue to hear each other, listen to each other, stay in touch. “Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk” takes on a completely different value today by virtue of what happened to Fatima, a journalist and photographer, killed with her family exactly the day after the film was admitted to the Croisette in one of the selections. Yet another blood tribute to those in Gaza who in recent months have tried to tell what Israel does not want to be told: a surgical operation to dismantle a people, its massacre, its destruction. Everything happens through an often unstable Internet connection, Farsi has decided to keep the grainy, sometimes quite disturbing essence of that poorly defined face, armed however with a magnificent, indomitable voice, which talks to us about what is happening in Gaza, about the bombings, about hunger and desperation. But there is also the certainty that, somehow, the soul of the Palestinian people, crushed between a hard place and a rock, will survive this too, in some way, as history has always taught in these cases.

Two women, separated by distance, united by the desire not to give up

“Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk” already in the title refers to a phrase said by Fatima, on the danger represented by bombs, but above all by snipers, those who had no qualms about killing children who were looking for food. Death hovers throughout the 112 minutes of this extraordinary documentary which, in the end, inevitably begins to infuriate the viewer, or at least make him cultivate a feeling of inadequacy and impotence, which from the middle onwards honestly becomes oppressive. Knowing that Fatima is no longer there, that she was killed despite her courage, her coherence, her self-sacrifice in trying to make the truth about the siege and the massacres, the bombings visible for all to see, leads one to wonder whether it makes this documentary more or less powerful. The fact remains that without a shadow of a doubt, it is one of the best of its kind in recent years, another great fresco of civil cinema to be passed down to posterity, to remember that not everyone was indifferent, not everyone turned the other way.

Of course, “Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk” is not a film for everyone, but it is really difficult to remain indifferent to Fatima’s voice, to that smile that comes to us from another world. This is despite a feeling of growing fear, in some cases almost authentic horror, which arises from knowing, or rather imagining, what is happening beyond that unstable frame. “Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk” once again makes the unseen, the unknown, the source of a horror that is based on our abstractive capacity, given that the mind is stronger than the gaze, which makes it even more incisive. “Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk” creates an ideal tandem with ben Hania’s film, which is also ultimately partly documentary. They are two sides of the same coin, of an important, fundamental artistic legacy. It will be even more so in the coming years, when we will have to explain to the new generations how it was possible to have doctors and journalists massacred with impunity, to allow the genocide of an entire population. It will also help fight misinformation. But Fatima and Sepiedh, they did something great.

Rating: 9