Debate X NZIFF #12: Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk

DEBATE X NZIFF | REVIEW | WEB EXCLUSIVE

Written by Nathan Cosmic (he/him) | @nathan.cosmic GenKlytusEyes | Contributing Writer

Since October 7th, the world has been watching a live-streamed genocide. The overexposure of crying parents holding their dead dismembered kids, the burning bodies of hospital patients, and the bloody dust-covered babies in rubble has put anyone with a heart in a helpless state. While we watch these horrors through our OLED screens, Put Your Soul On Your Hand and Walk makes this so-called war intimate with its audience through the WhatsApp correspondence of director Sepideh Farsi with a 24-year-old Gazan photographer, Fatima Hassouna.

Throughout their multi-month conversations in 2024, Farsi frequently feels worried weeks at a time if Fatima can ever see her again, as the question looms through disconnections, lag, and bad internet, if Fatima is dead.

Fatima appears on her calls with a beaming smile that radiates joy, yet it doesn’t make the experiences she speaks about any less horrible. Intercut between the disconnections are displays of her photography documenting the ruin of Gaza, which are eerily too similar to the dark passages of history. Buildings reduced to rocks with the Palestinian people making shelter within the wreckage while children roam, still smiling. The joy of the Palestinian people here is inspiring, but the precious life they display in their faces are most likely lost in either starvation or murder.

Our beautifully lovely protagonist recounts the Gazan reality, providing personal insight into this ethnic cleansing campaign. As she keeps moving around the Gaza Strip, avoiding bombs at the direction of the Israeli occupational forces that even on her calls drop bombs close to her, she tells the story of the murder of her closest friends and family, one being her dearest grandma. Weeks before her death, she pleaded for her grandchild to stay with her. Fatima, with sadness, says they never got to bury and say goodbye to her. These FaceTime conversations and messages are nothing short of something out of a nightmare. Fatima’s pictures show, and her experiences of torture, starvation, and depression portray a life in a helpless prison. Fatima even questions why she deserves such a life, why can’t she be a normal girl with a normal life?

This film will leave you devastated and consumed with melancholic emotion, or enraged, even as I was with eyes watering; however, Put Your Soul On Your Hand and Walk should be an activation. This is not just the story of Fatima but of all Palestinians. Her story is even more tragic when, before the screening of her story at Cannes, Israel bombed her and her 13 family members in their sleep at 1AM in April 2025.