Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk

Sepideh Farsi is an Iranian director who has lived in Paris since her twenties. In April 2024 she was put in touch with Fatma Hassona, a twenty-four-year-old photojournalist in Gaza City, and began calling her. The calls continued for roughly a year. The film that came out of them was selected for the ACID sidebar at Cannes in 2025; the day after the selection was announced, Hassona was killed with nine members of her family in an airstrike on their home.

Almost the entire film is a laptop screen. The connection drops, freezes, pixelates and returns; Hassona appears in fragments, often laughing, showing Farsi photographs she has taken that morning, explaining what she has eaten, arguing about whether she should leave. Farsi keeps her own image in the corner, which turns the film into a two-hander about the distance between a woman who can leave and a woman who cannot. Hassona's own photographs, shown throughout, are extraordinary.

The circumstances of its premiere gave the film an afterlife nobody wanted, and it is worth saying that it was already a serious piece of work before that: an argument about what a video call is, and what it means to make a portrait of somebody through a medium that keeps failing. Farsi has said she does not consider it finished, only stopped.