A filmmaker connects with a Palestinian woman in Gaza who documents life under bombardment. Following over 200 days of digital exchanges, the meaning shifts when Fatema dies in an Israeli attack April 16 of this year.

Farsi’s film lands in North America — Kino Lorber started its domestic rollout at the IFC Center Nov. 5 — as New York celebrates the election of its first Muslim mayor, the publicly pro-Palestinian Zohran Mamdani, and amid renewed debate over representation and responsibility in covering Gaza.

It's an old story, really. The US's sympathies have always - perhaps understandably? - been with the Jewish, that is the Israeli, side in matters pertaining to Israel. Lately, however, the tide has shifted a bit. The word "genocide" gained currency in discussing the past two years of Israeli assault on Gaza. The pattern was familiar. We won't go back to beginnings. October 7, 2023 was a stunning Hamas-engineered assault on Israel that killed 1,200 and took over 250 prisoners. Actually, a current report says more precisely that 1,195 people were killed by the attacks, 736 Israeli civilians (including 38 children), 79 foreign nationals, and 379 members of the security forces. The Israeli retaliation is always a hundred-fold or a thousand-fold. A current online report of the Gazans killed by Israel is 70,000. But that death toll is ongoing, and, after all, most of Gasa has been reduced to rubble. The Israeli bombing and its effect have been compared to the most extreme assaults in World War II. But this isn't noticed. The way the local side is viewed is summed up in the title of the book about this group's treatment by Hollywood: Reel Bad Arabs .. The subtitle of this book by Jack G. Shaheen is How Hollywood Vilifies a People . This vilification has shaped the popular view of Arabs and Palestinians in the indifferent eyes of average Americans.

For those who would like the Arab side to gain a fairier hearing, recent changes are heartening. It is now a long time since Golda Meir was PM of Israel and said "there is no such thing as a Palestinian people." The word "Palestinian" is gaining currency and understanding (a stateless and landless people is, admittedly, a difficult concept). Yes, Zohran Mamdani is the charismatic, energetic new mayor of New York City. But New York is not America. And the maker of the documentary film Put Your Soul in Your Hand and Walk isn't an American. She is is an award-winning Iranian filmmaker currently based in Paris, known for her documentaries, animated films, and narrative features. Farsi's work often explores themes of identity and political and social struggles, stemming from her own experiences after being imprisoned as a dissident in Iran at 16 and subsequently leaving the country at 18.

Farsi's new film also isn't a documentary, exactly. It's a document. She simply registered and afterward edited her smartphone chats with Gazan on-site documentarian and photographer (we see some of her fine still images) Fatma (or Fatima) Hassona, whose English (the language of their chats) Hassona confesses at the outset isn't great. Actually, though it's approximate, her words are consistently vivid and eloquent.

Perhaps it doesn't even matter so much really what they're saying. What matters is that Farsi is reaching out, and wants to be there. She had sought permission to go to Gaza but been denied. This was the best she could do, and the connection is never good and often breaks off. But Hassona is a warm, joyous person whose generous and hopeful personality leaps off the fuzzy images of the smartphone screen. She knows her life is in danger. That's what she and all those around her have lived with, as long as they can remember. Look at the rubble and calculate how safe it would be to live there. We now know that a day after this film was selected to be shown at Cannes, Hassona was killed in an Israeli airstrike along with several members of her family. In fact, earlier she had told Farsi in one of their chats the sound outside was an Apache helicopter and when Farsi asked what it was there for, Hassona answered "To kill us." They did; it happened. She was very alive and then she was dead. This film is a record of that moment, and perhaps a message to westerners and especially to Americans of what this "conflict" really means, and a glimpse of what it would be like if every time you went out for provisions you had to put your soul on your hand and walk.

Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, 113 mins., premiered at the ACID parallel section of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival on 15 May and shown at many other festivals including Melbourne, Edinburgh, Busan, Toronto, the NYFF, Athens, Rome, Chicago and DOC NYC. It was theatrically released in France Sept. 24 by New Story. US theatrical relaase Nov. 7, 2025 (IFC Center). Metacritic rating: 84%.

_________________
©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.