‘Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk’ review: A Palestinian poet brings hope

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There will be stories to tell for a long time about what Gazans have endured over the past couple of years, and films will be part of that relief. This spring, Iranian director Sepideh Farsi believed she would present a unique and rewarding portrait of one Palestinian woman's life when the Cannes Film Festival accepted her documentary “Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk,” the result of her year of energetic video chats with the positive-minded 25-year-old photojournalist and poet Fatma Hassona. The day after the news in Cannes, Hassona and her family were killed by an Israeli missile.

It's not uncommon for a finished film to become something completely different overnight. But what's amazing about “Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk,” given its added tragic weight, is that Hassona's strength of personality and Farsi's filmmaking choices still manage to do what it says: talk about what's ineffably beautiful about our human capacity for hope and connection.

In her introduction, Farsi explains how she sought a path to Gaza to understand it beyond media reports. This proved physically impossible, but through a refugee friend she was connected with Hassona in April 2024. In their first video call, which Farsi, then in Cairo, recorded on a separate smartphone, Hassona's beaming face immediately dispels any notion that all Palestinians must exist in a defeated state amid incessant bombing. Asked how she feels, Hassona, who witnessed the huge explosion the day before, replies: “I’m proud.” With casual ease, she assures the Farsi that they will continue to live their lives and laugh, that they are “special people.” She knows that every day is active work and does not allow herself to get used to it. The title of the documentary is Hassona's description of what she does when she leaves the house.

You believe her. This powerful smile feels like the exact opposite of a bombshell. But it's also easy to see Farsi's ingrained cynicism about the state of things, having once been jailed as a teenage dissident in the years following her country's Islamic Revolution and now living in exile. In her voice-over, Farsi describes meeting Hassona as if she were confronted with a mirror, realizing “how much our lives are conditioned by walls and wars.”

Farsi is present in many of Hassona's photographs. Images of daily life amid the destruction and debris – children, cyclists, workers, laundry drying on the upper floors of a dilapidated building – hint at the unquenchable flames that continue the campaign of death.

Although Farsi knows how to ask for details about his life in Gaza, the atmosphere here is not one of the interviews conducted to make the film, but one of genuine curiosity and warmth, the ebb and flow of real-life interactions captured whenever possible. Meanwhile, war, politics and failed leadership can be seen in brief breaks in news reports on Farsi television. But they are always cut off, as if to say: “I would prefer to hear the opinion of my friend who lives by this.”

Hassona's face becomes so familiar to us that we can tell when it is difficult to maintain her cheerful disposition. But her energy and hope never seem to be a draining resource. “I want to be in a normal place!” she blurts out in one of their last conversations, as if she were the main character of a musical about to break into song. But Hassona never succeeded in anything beyond the first act.

The ending is not revealed in Farsi: just a sparse text after their final conversation, followed by a video Hassona took driving around the devastated city, somehow grounded in the tangible, immortal everyday. You will feel the loss, but the residual image of this unique woman's faith in finding the light is what will burn.