Even before the Cannes Film Festival's 78th edition started on 13 May, Gaza was already a major talking point. About a month before, 25-year-old Palestinian photojournalist Fatima Hassouna was killed by an Israeli airstrike on her home in Gaza, alongside ten members of her family, including her pregnant sister.
Just a day before the brutal attack, it had been announced that a documentary by Iranian film director Sepideh Farsi, focusing on Fatima's daily life since the Israeli genocide in Gaza began, would premiere in Cannes.
Tributes began pouring in, with many highlighting that as of 7 May, the Israeli army had killed nearly 200 journalists in Gaza.
This staggering figure is more than the number of journalists killed in both world wars, Vietnam, Korea, and Afghanistan combined, according to a report from Brown University's Costs of War project.
The first significant tribute came from ACID (Association for the Distribution of Independent Cinema), a section running parallel to the Cannes Film Festival that selected Sepideh Farsi’s documentary.
Then came a tribute from the Cannes Film Festival itself, expressing “its dread and profound sadness at this tragedy that has moved and shocked the whole world.”
French actress Juliette Binoche’s opening ceremony speech also mentioned that Fatima Hassouna “should have been here tonight with us.” Her speech came one day after over 300 film celebrities, ranging from Richard Gere to Ralph Fiennes, Susan Sarandon to Javier Bardem, called on the film industry to break its “silence” over Israel’s war crimes in Gaza, and addressed the letter “For Fatem".
Speaking to The New Arab, Sepideh Farsi, the director of the now widely-discussed documentary, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, says: “I'm glad, on one hand, that I can contribute to raising Palestinian voices and making the festival more vocal, along all the artists who are siding with me against the silence [on Gaza]. And on the other hand, I take distance, because what matters to me now – beyond the film – what’s really important is that it can help as much as possible to end the war.”
The 60-year-old Iranian director is no stranger to working on tough political issues, confronting repressive regimes, or sometimes seeing performative acts of solidarity.
Sepideh grew up in a politically active left-wing family in Iran, did eight months of prison when she was younger, a couple of years after the 1979 revolution, and later directed subversive documentaries mostly filmed on mobile phones in Iran and Afghanistan, including Harat and Tehran Without Permission.
She recalls that “when the Woman, Life, Freedom movement happened, we Iranians got a lot of attention."
Sepideh tells The New Arab, "I did many things in Berlin, Cannes, so forth. And many female actors, politicians, etc., cut their hair in solidarity with Iranian women. That was easy to do. But the problem is that when there’s something harder, people need to have the courage to do it. Sometimes you have to pay a little price.”
The Paris-based Iranian filmmaker noted how, in many tributes shared about Fatima, including the Cannes Film Festival’s and Juliette Binoche’s, Israel wasn’t mentioned as the killer, even though ample proof was released.
An open-source investigative outlet, Forensic Architecture, reported that Israeli forces had carried out precise strikes on the Hassouna family home.
“Why is it that people are so shy or so fearful of naming?” Sepideh asks. “Are they thinking that they will be tagged as being anti-Semites, or they would lose contracts, or what exactly are they fearing? I don't know… If you don't name the perpetrator and if you don't phrase the problem, what good is that? I don't think it's enough, but we all have our levels of bravery and responsibility, and each person and institution is different.”
Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk is a nearly two-hour-long documentary mostly filled with recordings of WhatsApp video calls between Sepideh and Fatima, painting an evolving complicity between the two.
Sepideh started the project in early 2024, eager to find voices from Gaza to narrate their own stories. She travelled to Cairo, with the hope of passing through the Rafah crossing into Gaza, but realised there was no way through. In the Egyptian capital, she met many Palestinian refugees, one of whom would put her in contact with Fatima.
Initially, Sepideh just wanted the Palestinian photographer to send her images, but she remembers how, “from the first connection, something happened [between us]. It was clear that she was the centre of the film.”
The film narrates life in Gaza through the eyes of Fatima, an energetic and larger-than-life figure whose radiant smile always fills the screen despite Israel’s constant attacks.
“Her resilience, her humility, and her pride were real lessons for me,” Sepideh shares with The New Arab.
“She never ever complained. It was amazing how strong she could still be and how hopeful. She told me: ‘This war will end. We will be free.’ And I was always amazed at her capacity to keep that hope.”
The phone calls between the two are filmed from another mobile phone, creating an often blurry and unclean final cut, while Sepideh kept many moments when her phone calls with Fatima were interrupted by a poor internet connection.
These were all intentional moves by the filmmaker, who says she “was fighting against the sharpness of the image, to emphasise this difficulty of connection… It becomes almost like a painting at points, as it's such a bad quality, and her face freezes.”
It is in these moments where Fatima’s smile takes up the entire screen that this documentary can be best remembered: as a tribute to someone who is not here anymore, although it was obviously all made without her death in mind.
Key questions can and should still be asked since the film has received so much attention. Would it have been so talked about if Fatima hadn’t been killed? Would the young photojournalist still be alive if there hadn’t been a film made about her, particularly one selected in Cannes?
For Sepideh Farsi, the answers are only speculations for now.
“It's hard for me to think that I am responsible for her death, and I will never know until they [Israeli forces] open the archives and I know who gave that order and why," Sepideh shares.
"But for sure, part of it was because of her work; of her being a photographer, and having done interviews. Now people cry coming out of the film, and I'm glad that people are touched by it. But had she been with me, would we have had this much attention? I don't know. This is how cruel the world is.”
The film’s title comes from a line Fatima would often say: “Every day you go on the streets, you put your soul on your hand and walk.”
Sepideh was hoping that Fatima would be in attendance in Cannes. Israel may have killed that dream, but not her talent.
The festival remembered the young photojournalist by organising an exhibition of her photos in a hotel full of stars, displaying her image outside the festival’s press centre.
Fatima Hassouna’s words that she had written on social media graced the festival: “If I die, I want a loud death. I don’t want to be just breaking news, or a number in a group, I want a death that the world will hear, an impact that will remain through time, and a timeless image that cannot be buried by time or place.”
Alexander Durie is a journalist working across video, photography, and feature writing. He has freelanced for The Guardian, Al Jazeera English, The Economist, The Financial Times, Reuters, The Independent, and more, contributing dispatches from Paris, Berlin, Beirut, and Warsaw
Follow him on Instagram: @alexander.durie