She should have been there, but instead, Iranian filmmaker Sepideh Farsi held up a photo. It was of a young woman with a radiant smile, her gentle face framed by a veil. At 8 pm in the Olympia cinema hall in Cannes, on Thursday, May 15, the audience rose as one to honor the memory of Gaza photojournalist Fatma Hassona, also known as "Fatem." On April 16, at the age of 25, she died, along with several of her relatives, in the bombing of the building where she lived, in the Al-Touffah neighborhood, in the northern part of Gaza City.
In such moments, the festival audience feels both concerned and powerless. The president of the Cannes competition jury, Juliette Binoche, paid tribute to "Fatem" during the opening ceremony on May 13. The day before, an open letter published in Vanity Fair and Libération, gathering more than 300 cinema figures (Pedro Almodovar, David Cronenberg, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Ruben Östlund, etc.), condemned the "silence" over Gaza.
Hassona's name has been added to the list of some 200 journalists killed since the start of Israel's ground offensive, in retaliation for Hamas's attacks on October 7, 2023. Since that date, Hassona had been documenting daily life for the enclave's residents, which Israel prohibits foreign journalists from accessing.
Slow disappearance of an image
What remains is the documentary in which she is the heroine, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, by Farsi, who was born in 1965 and is a refugee in France. The film was presented in the official selection of ACID (Independent Film Association for Distribution), running parallel to the festival, and is set to be released in French theaters on September 24, distributed by New Story. Hassona's death occurred the day after the film's selection at Cannes was announced.
Farsi clarified that "Fatem's" home was targeted by an Israeli attack, citing the conclusions of Forensic Architecture, based at Goldsmiths University in London. This collective of researchers and architects uses spatial data to investigate state violence, human rights violations and its reports are often presented in court. "I don't know how to describe people who give such orders, to eliminate a young woman who is just taking photos. Are these images really that disturbing? I guess so," said the filmmaker.
For the duration of the festival, Hassona's photographs are on display at the Majestic Hotel, on the Croisette, as well as at the Palestinian pavilion in the Village International. "Fatma said: 'I want a loud, spectacular death, I don't want to be just a number on the last page of a newspaper.' (...) You will meet her, she is brilliant," added the director before the screening.
For a year, Farsi filmed her conversations with "Fatem," who had never seen anything other than Gaza. The film tells the story of the friendship between the two women, who exchanged news and talked via video calls. Farsi must have always feared for her friend's life, pushing away the possibility, believing in miracles, while sensing that this friendship film would also become a cinematic tombstone. It's not certain if any audience has experienced anything like this before: The duration of a film as a countdown, where each second takes away a little more life, joy, from the face of a young woman. A film that presents, in essence, the slow disappearance of an image.
Little pixelated window
Before she was murdered, everything had already been taken from "Fatem," "the big things and the small things." Food, carefree moments, the future. Like all Gazans, she had lost dozens of loved ones, killed under Israeli army bombings. Yet, "Fatem" still managed to smile. This is a common trait of great documentaries about war-torn populations devastated by death: They are also great movies about life. Because, before disappearing, "Fatem" appears and lingers before our eyes, in this film that seeks to eternally record the thoughts and life of a young Gazan, connecting us to what will always be missing from the informational realm: intimacy, the impression of touching one life and, through it, all others.
Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk is the story of a young girl who, strangely enough, lives: She writes poems, dreams of traveling. It is from this little pixelated window, emblematic of the prison she finds herself in, that "Fatem" tells her story, drawing our attention to the slightest thing entering the frame: the different colored veils that frame and illuminate her face in various ways, the shy smile of a younger brother (also killed), the smoke rising from a bombed building, a pack of potato chips appearing in the middle of famine.
Opposite her, Farsi, iPhone in hand, also offers a window into of her immediate environment: opulent, well-decorated apartments in Canada, Cairo and Paris; a cat waiting for the door to be opened; freedom of movement; electricity; and a peace that usually needs no words but here resonates cruelly. The film hangs entirely on the terrifyingly fragile thread, on the verge of breaking, that connects a peaceful world with a corner of hell.
Communication is also hanging by a thread, subject to the vagaries of internet connection in Gaza: very often, "Fatem's" face freezes, disappears, dissolves into a sprinkle of pixels, the mad poetry of digital, which here speaks of death. Fragments of sentences are swallowed, the connection cracks. Black screen.
Farsi wanted to capture this, this ghostliness, this low definition with its funereal texture, which astonishingly conveys the tragedy of "Fatem." The young woman smiles less and less, fading away, feels distracted, she explains, preventing her from reacting to events. Her Iranian friend tells her, "I'm losing you."
French, Palestinian, Iranian documentary by Sepideh Farsi (1 h 50 min). In French theaters on September 24.