Put Your Soul On Your Hand and Walk struggles to balance humility amidst the raw display of human connection
Put Your Soul On Your Hand and Walk was one of the only films at the Toronto International Film Festival that I was actively disappointed by.
It is hard to find space for criticism of such a documentary given the tragedy of its main subject, Fatma Hassouna, a 25-year old Palestinian photographer who was killed by an Israeli airstrike on her family home. The ache I felt in watching someone so full of life and so clearly optimistic for her future in the wake of terrible indiscriminate violence perpetuated by a rogue state is more than palpable.
Director Sepideh Farsi’s goal was initially to travel to the Gaza strip, but due to the Israeli state’s refusal to allow outside journalists in, the production pivoted to create a docuseries on Palestinians who has just found refuge into Egypt. While starting this, a Palestinian man told Farsi about Fatma and her photography. This inspired the director to start a friendship with the photographer from afar. Farsi pitched the idea of a documentary following their friendship and conversations through video calls, where Fatma shared glimpses of her life in Gaza under the brutal Israeli siege. Put Your Soul On Your Hand and Walk is a collection of video call recordings and short news reports describing life on the ground in Gaza.
As impactful as that sounds, the documentary is poorly made. At first I wondered if my gripes were mostly about stylistic choices that I could eventually look past, but the more I watched the more evident it was that there was not sufficient amount of care put into properly documenting this story.
We start our video calls with Farsi recording a phone on a phone. This creates a rawness to the calls, creating some initial sympathy. A simple direct screen-recording of the call likely would have removed many of the personal anxieties around the signal being lost or the call suddenly dropping.
But this style of documenting the video calls sours as Farsi is frequently unprepared for the calls. There are several times in the documentary where she moves locations after a call to adjust how the lighting looks in frame, and she repeatedly pauses her interviews for moments to let her cat into a room. The ‘rawness’ of the quality fades into a sort of unintentional disrespect to Fatma whose own raw quality is hard to create comfortably. Fatma needs to visit her friends’ or cousins’ houses to secure reliable enough service for many of the calls, and when she pauses the interview it’s because she has more pressing responsibilities like taking care of younger family members.
The poor quality that is created when recording a phone on a phone is echoed in a more confusing way, as Farsi decides to include phone recordings of news clips about Gaza. Why was this not just a screen recording of the publicly available news clips? The stylistic reason for this is never touched on, instead we get several recordings of Farsi playing with her cat as the news of famine in Gaza is in the background, in an uncomfortable slice-of-life fashion. The only phone recorded segments are breaks to show Fatma’s photography of Gaza. Decimated buildings, children playing around rubble, and portrayals of grief hold space in between the tense conversations.
Unfortunately, the poor quality of the production isn’t limited to its stylistic choices, but extends to Farsi being a terrible interviewer. She repeatedly asks questions without proper setup and would also ask questions that a civilian in Gaza would have no real response to. At one point when talking about the Israeli military’s use of weaponry, she asks “What would they need an Apache helicopter for?” and somewhat earnestly waits for a reply from Fatma.
The style of questioning is particularly sour given how cynical and depressive Farsi comes off. Time and time again, she chimes in about how terrible the news is about Gaza and “everything going on,” before asking Fatma, “is it bad?” or “how are you doing?” The bleakness in setting up a question with how terrible something must be for someone living through it, and then asking them to describe how terrible it is for them is just baffling. Fortunately, the questioning does give a glimpse of Fatma’s remarkable optimism and power. She remains steadfast in the belief that the siege will end. For almost the entire span of the documentary, Fatma radiates a beautiful smile, showing an unwillingness to consistently be in sorrow regarding her surroundings.
Farsi’s interviewing, however, is stuck in her own surroundings as her questions shift from cynical to insensitive. While travelling from country to country — France, Italy, Canada — she gives Fatma glimpses of her hotels before asking plainly if the photographer had ever travelled outside of Gaza. The director’s lack of sensitivity towards a woman stuck in constant bombardment continues, to the point where she references that Fatma has lost weight, and asks her point-blank, “have you lost weight because of the food blockade?” Time and time again I was dumbfounded at how poorly set-up these questions were and how poorly conceived the documentary felt as a result.
The positivity shown by Fatma was powerful and invites more of the insightful questions in the documentary about hope, where Fatma tells Farsi about why she believes she needs to stay in Gaza and document what’s going on. At one point, she says, “I think my Gaza needs me.” There is an earnestness and a passion shown in the photographer that stands clearly apart from the line of questioning that Farsi seems to prefer.
Farsi also displays Islamaphobic microaggressions, making note of Fatma adjusting her hijab before asking if she wants to take it off and excitedly remarking “I’ve never seen your hair!” From this, she turns to a line of questioning about Fatma’s choice to wear the hijab, asking how long she’s worn it and if it was “forced on her.” The context behind this is likely the director’s own relationship to Islam, as she herself is an Iranian living in exile due to previously being imprisoned as an activist vocally against the regime in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Bluntly put, Farsi uses these personal experiences from 30 years ago to assume what a Palestinian woman’s relationship with Islam must also be like. It is very clear that she doesn’t hold Muslim-majority countries in much of a high regard, stating at some point that they are all the same. At another point in the documentary, she asks Fatma what she thinks of Yahya Sinwar, then leader of Hamas, to which the photographer lightly suggests she isn’t the biggest fan but recognizes his efforts to make Gaza look strong in the face of Israeli adversity. Farsi responds by further inquiring if he is unpopular there, before outright comparing him to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
There is such a clear lack of understanding of the history and circumstances that surround the bombardment and history of Gaza. The documentary focuses on Fatma’s victimhood rather than her unrelenting perseverance.
The tragedy that came to Fatma following the recordings in the documentary is described through text on the screen, and immediately following there is a sharp sink of sorrow created in the loss of such a passionate and optimistic woman. Although the interview style does not give as much room to share her life, I hope the memory of her stored in this documentary and her phenomenal photos continues to speak to the perseverance of Palestinians.
