Sepideh Farsi’s documentary “Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Stroll” follows 25-year-old Gaza photojournalist Fatma Hassona, a narrative of a girl below siege by fixed bombing, made particularly sobering by its circumstances. On April 16, 2025, only a day after the film’s Cannes Movie Pageant choice was introduced, Hassona was killed in an Israeli airstrike, turning the movie right into a cinematic epitaph to a life reduce far too quick.

Farsi takes an uncommon visible method to capturing Hassona, however one which finally pays dividends. Utilizing one smartphone to movie one other, the Iranian director creates layers of distance between the viewers and her topic — or quite, mimics the precise divide between the 2 girls — throughout their many WhatsApp video chats. Farsi can not enter Gaza, and Hassona can not depart, leaving pixelated calls with delayed audio (owing to Hassona’s poor web connection) as their solely option to join.

There probably would have been clearer, extra conventional choices to shoot this footage, between the opportunity of screen-recording, or maybe utilizing Hassona’s personal DSLR digicam, however choosing a lo-fi mise en abyme has a dueling impact. On one hand, it retains Hassona tragically out of attain, the best way she was for Farsi throughout their year-long dialog, starting in April 2024. Then again, the moments wherein Farsi inserts Hassona’s images on display screen grow to be all of the extra placing. Her photos of Palestinian loss of life and survival, amid the rubble of bombed buildings, reveals a soulful command of shadow, composition and focus, which stands out in stark distinction to the blurry video chats.

Nevertheless, the calls themselves are the crux of the film, and show immensely alluring regardless of their poor high quality. Hassona, in her damaged English, narrates her life and every day circumstances, from her household being starved to the hazard of falling bombs as quickly as she walks out the door to her goals of someday escaping Gaza and touring to Rome. Nevertheless, regardless of the loss of life and destruction round her, she delivers every bit of reports and knowledge with a radiant grin, making an attempt to remain constructive and snort off even essentially the most inhumane horrors. Throughout a number of calls, the audio is interrupted by choppers and drones overhead and bombs falling on neighbors’ homes. At one level, she turns her digicam to a pillar of smoke close by, the place a residential constructing had stood simply moments earlier.

These heart-wrenching photographs are given better political context as Farsi movies her laptop computer in between calls (or whereas ready for Hassona to name again, after a name has been dropped) whereas information movies about Gaza and Israel play on loop. All of the whereas, Farsi stays a topic too — a helpless observer to those occasions, diminished to a mere form by way of her reflection in her smudged pc display screen. She asks Hassona for her opinions as nicely, which the younger photographer as soon as once more delivers with a smile, whilst she unpacks her complicated emotions concerning the bigger state of affairs. These particulars, nevertheless, pale compared to the seemingly inconsequential anecdotes Hassona narrates about her every day life, every time with a distinct hijab to match her outfit, or a distinct pair of shades or glasses.

Hassona is each trendy and immensely proficient (she shares her Arabic poems and songs with Farsi), and the extra we see of her over the film’s 110 minutes, the extra devastating it turns into that we’ll by no means meet her, or by no means actually get to know her. The proximity of her killing to the Cannes Movie Pageant probably signifies that little has modified within the movie, apart from an added scene and acknowledgment close to the top. Besides, Farsi’s aesthetic method — which might have so simply been grating — proves endearing and heartbreaking in equal measure, as an outline of the precise method wherein a filmmaker bought to know her topic intimately earlier than her loss of life. Regardless of its tragic final result, the movie proves stirring in its capability for hope in opposition to all odds, whereas additionally inserting on full show the price of occupation, portraying the complete extent of the lives and goals dashed by struggle.