Put Your Soul On Your Hand And Walk Review: A Raw, Devastating Video Diary of Life In Wartime

A day after Sepideh Farsi’s Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk was selected for the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, its subject was killed in an Israeli airstrike along with six other members of her family. Fatma Hassona was 24, an aspiring photojournalist whose stunning compositions of life in wartime supply the film with an invaluable context. The documentary is an extended video diary of an uncommon friendship; Sepideh is an established Iranian filmmaker, Fatma a burgeoning artist who dreams of leaving the confines of a ravaged city.

Though Sepideh had finished editing before news of Fatma’s death, the film is brimming with a nauseating foreshadowing of certain death. Each of their conversations is shot horizontally, with Sepideh filming their video call conversations with a secondary phone. The effect is at once distancing and intimate. It accentuates the natural separation between filmmaker and subject while keeping them on a level playing field; Sepideh never films with a “professional” camera, giving all of their conversations the feel of two friends catching up in the worst of circumstances.

Yet Fatma, who had already lost 13 family members by the time their correspondence began, in early 2024, exudes warmth and humor. Her smile is exceptional, her green eyes piercing even the pixelated image of a poor internet connection. At several points during their early conversations, Fatma insists on a bewildering optimism. As the film continues, her hope dims, but never enough that she can’t imagine the prospect of walking the red carpet with Sepideh in the south of France.

Put Your Soul On Your Hand And Walk Is A Stunning Work Of Intimate Non-Fiction

The choice to film conversations via phone is fitting, considering the way in which we’ve consumed the genocide in Gaza in the very same way. Through a series of cell phones, there is a subtle subversion of the inurement of too many images. The more we see, the more desensitized we become to the severing of limbs, the destruction of hospitals, the blockade of food and basic goods. It also gives new life to the tension of a tenuous connection. With each momentary break in video call or drop in audio, the possibility looms that this may be the last of Fatma that we hear.

And she is a wondrous subject. An artist herself, Fatma also understands the power of image-making. At times, her images are direct rebukes of persistent narratives that come from the Israeli military. Given that she is surrounded by bombardment, it’s a given that the bulk of their conversation is dominated by the dropping of bombs. Yet, Fatma exemplifies her people’s persistence. “I feel proud” to be Palestinian, she says in the spring of 2024, “they can’t defeat us!“

Between their conversations, Sepideh includes news footage, also captured through her cell phone. Talks of ceasefire agreements, exchanges of hostages, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s barking about Israeli security tie together private talks between filmmaker and subject about life, about food, about dreams of escape. This uncommon image of survival accentuates the devastation of loss. Fatma is just one victim; what other worlds have we lost with each new death?

Sepideh Farsi began her career photographing protests within Iran, and so the two share an implicit connection beyond the obvious. Sepideh could symbolize a version of the person Fatma could have been had she indeed survived. In these two women, a subtle portrait of political resistance is painted amidst the rubble. The film’s title comes from a late conversation in which Fatma tries to relay, in English, what it feels like to simply be outside at such a moment. “You put your soul on your hand and walk,” she says. Her charmingly, slightly off English is poetic — and indeed, she also wrote poetry — suggesting how vulnerable it is to truly live and breathe while merely existing as a perceived enemy. And our souls may never be the same.

Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk is now playing in limited theaters.