Our worlds can change in an instant…

Put Your Soul On Your Hand And Walk is a tragic testament to the power of human connection in the face of unspeakable atrocities.

This film is an intimate, first-hand perspective on life under siege in Gaza, captured through video calls between director Sepideh Farsi and 25-year-old Palestinian photojournalist and poet Fatma Hassona. Combining raw immediacy with deep humanity, the film captures daily life during the conflict through the eyes and unwaveringly optimistic presence of Fatma, a talented photographer whose generation is trapped in an endless cycle of war, famine, and resistance.

It’s rare that a documentary can plant us in the emotional core of a story so quickly and so simply but that’s what Put Your Soul On Your Hand And Walk does in spades.

This film is truly a vital record of not only a life but in how someone lived at the same time making for an experience that is both extraordinary yet supremely beautiful in its ordinary nature.

Through these 200+ days of video chats with subject Fatma Hassona, what Sepideh Farsi manages to do is document a life and one of a friend who managed to keep her head held high in the face of the unimaginable horrors that she had to bear witness to until the tragic death of her and her remaining family.

While death and devastation are on the other side of the door, Farsi allows us to not only see the politics and events that unfold in Gaza but also to see what the toll that these human tragedies can do to the human spirit.

Boldly making the bulk of the film shooting her WhatsApp chats with Hassona, Farsi very simply and very beautifully make it practically impossible to look away which given such politically and socially charged material and damn near impossibility to pull off, but it happens with ease as yet another example of Iranian filmmaking that knows how to maximize the moment because we quite simply never know when the next one will come.

There’s certainly no denying the tragic nature in being able to tell a story like Put Your Soul On Your Hand An Walk but there’s also something inspiring and aspirational about it too.  The title which was coined by the subject in the film in many ways is a call to arms in the myriad of “first world problems” that we are all confronted with daily to remember the simply power of being able to go outside with worrying about the world around, quite literally falling on top of you.

It’s easy to focus on the political and news bytes around the tragedy in the Gaza, but it’s the human stories that we all need to hear in order to understand what the costs of war and conflict can truly be.