"And they are: Put Your Soul on Your Hand (now playing in New York and expanding in the coming weeks) is built out of these video calls, the screen dominated by Hassona's young face almost always smiling even when she's terrified and in tears. And while her personality - playful, curious, excitable - certainly comes through, these calls are dominated by interruptions."
"The signal cuts out; the noise drops out; the image freezes. Much of what Hassona says is indecipherable. The damaged pictures and sounds highlight her vulnerability; it's like she's connecting, tenuously and temporarily, from a distant world, a world where the bombs never end and the Apache helicopters and fighter jets and drones never stop, a world where she can casually mention the fact that her aunt's head was found in the street next to her blasted house."
Put Your Soul on Your Hand began when filmmaker Sepideh Farsi, barred from entering Gaza after the 2023 strikes, connected with 24-year-old photographer Fatma Hassona over FaceTime. The documentary is composed of their video calls, with Hassona's young face filling the screen, often smiling amid terror and tears. Repeated signal loss, audio dropout, and frozen images punctuate the conversations and emphasize vulnerability and distance. Hassona occasionally describes extreme violence, including finding her aunt's head in the street. Hassona and her entire family were killed when their building was bombed on April 16; the film captures the moment she learns of a Cannes selection.
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