Review: ‘Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk’ puts a vibrant face to a horrific war
2025 / Dir. Sepideh Farsi
Rating: 4/5
Watch if you like: The Diary of Anne Frank, No Other Land, or The Voice of Hind Rajab.
I became an angel
For a city.
Huge
Bigger than my dreams
Bigger than this city
-Fatima Hassouna
More than 200 Gazan journalists have been killed since the war began in October 2023, including photojournalist Fatima Hassouna. Fatima—along with nine of her relatives, one of whom was her pregnant sister—was killed in the early morning hours of April 16, 2025, after her apartment was bombed by the Israeli army. The day before, she found out the documentary she had appeared in, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, would be featured at the Cannes Film Festival.
From early 2024 to April 15, 2025, exiled Iranian director Sepideh Farsi recorded WhatsApp video calls with Hassouna about her daily life, her photographic work, her beliefs, and her dreams for the future. Hassouna always has a beaming, nearly unshakeable smile on her face, whether she talks about her hope to be able to travel one day and have children, or shows Farsi the images of her 13 family members who have been killed. Her spirit will not be crushed despite near-daily horror, and her light shines through even a constantly atrocious internet connection.
Apart from the sections showing Hassouna’s photography—initially focused on life continuing amongst the rubble of a bombed-out city before culminating in a final image of a severed hand—Farsi wisely keeps the focus on the conversations. Sometimes we see news footage on her computer while she waits to see if Hassouna will answer her call. Even though I knew where this would end, I still felt anxiety waiting to see if she would answer and relief when she did.
To mixed results, Farsi decided to mimic the only way they could communicate—over the phone—by recording her phone with a second handheld phone. This decision maintains the raw immediacy of them–in one, Hassouna shows us a nearby bombing we just heard–but can become distracting from time to time. Farsi’s hand shakes, making the documentary visually difficult to watch. Other times when we see her laptop screen, I wanted to shout, “Clean your dirty screen!” I did appreciate the moments left in where Farsi has to get up to let her cat inside, both as moments of breathing room and as a reminder that, ultimately, we’re watching two friends share their lives.
This is a vital documentary that should be seen by anyone who has the chance. When it becomes so easy to get numb to the never-ending horror of the news, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk reminds us that for every daily uptick in Palestinian deaths, each number was a person with hopes and dreams. Most importantly, this documentary immortalizes a beautifully vibrant woman who gave her life to showing what was really happening in her city. She may be gone, but her smile will never fade.