Director Sepideh Farsi on the shock of losing Fatma Hassona, the Palestinian subject of his film, in a strike of Israeli missiles only a few weeks before his first in Cannes.
Photo: Sepideh Farsi
The world of cinema was shocked yesterday to learn the death of Fatma Hassona, a 25 -year -old Palestinian photojournalist and the subject of septusi’s documentary Farsi Put your soul on your hand and walkwhich should be presented at first at the Cannes Film Festival in May. Hassona was killed with her brothers and sisters, including her pregnant sister, by an Israeli missile strike which targeted their Gaza building. “I refused to accept it,” said Farsi about the first hearing of Hassona’s death. “I thought it was a mistake. I tried to reach out, to all the people I knew. ” The director was then confirmed by deaths, although she does not yet know if Fatma’s parents were also among the dead.
It is a deeply sad coda to a story already imbued with sadness. “His assassination adds another layer to this tragedy, but the tragedy was already there,” says Farsi, speaking via Zoom from Paris. She remembers many other times in the past year she was terrified for Fatma (known to her friends under the name of Fatem) and her family. Put your soul on your hand and walk is built in conversations that the director and Hassona had on the faceTime and other platforms. They could not meet in person, because the director could not travel to Palestine and Fatem had never left Gaza.
Farsi first connected with the young photographer when she decided to tell a story about life in wartime in Gaza. The director, who was born and grew up in Iran but moved to France in the 1980s, made a number of war films, including his experimental documentary in 2021 Each war is the sameOn the experiences of a Serbian Muslim refugee, and her 2019 drama I’m going to cross tomorrowAbout a young man fleeing the fights in Syria and making his way through Turkey towards Greece and Europe. At the time of the Hamas attacks on October 7, Farsi went to film festivals with her animated and award -winning drama The sirenAbout the Iran-Iraq war. “We were all shocked by these first attacks and the loss of Israeli civilians,” she said. But then, the reprisals of Israel, which she describes as “this Russian mountain which never ends”.
As she went to different cities in Asia and Europe, Farsi was struck by the emerging dominant story. “It’s a complex puzzle,” she says. “The Israeli part was represented, the European and Western point of view was represented, but the Palestinian point of view was missing.” It reminded him of looking at the cover of Iran and seeing how the story was shaped by the repressive regime of the Islamic Republic on the one hand and the Western media on the other. Farsi had witnessed the Iranian Revolution at the age of 13; She had been imprisoned at the age of 16 and had left Iran at 18; His films are currently prohibited in the country. “As Iranian dissident, I know what it means that other people tell your story,” she said.
She went to Cairo in the hope of finding a way to cross Rafah and Gaza. It turned out to be impossible. “It turns out that with a French passport, when you were born in Iran, you are stuck. Neither the Egyptians nor the Israelis nor the Palestinians or the French will help you, “says Farsi. Then, one of his Palestinian relations in Egypt recommended him to speak with Hassona. The young photographer had graduated in multimedia from the University College of Applied Sciences, and she also wrote poetry.
“At first, the idea was to ask her to send me images of Gaza, which she did,” she said. “But immediately, during the first video conversation, I said:” I’m going to film the conversation. You allow me? “” “Neither the director nor his subject knew what to expect, but during their first one hour video chat, with a precarious internet connection that flowed and released, an idea emerged: to build a film of their discussions. After that, they started to speak regularly: “Very quickly, she became the center of my film.”
Farsi was taken with the vitality and bravery of Hassona. His Images of Gaza showed the devastation of war, but also the humanity of people taken in the middle. Nor has it broken to portray horrible sites. “Sometimes I asked him:” Do you mind taking pictures of shredded bodies? ” And she said: “I think it must be documented, so I do it, and I think about it.” “The photos of Hassona de Hassona from before October 7 are decidedly different, capturing a large part of the beauty of the life that surrounds her. Many of them can still be seen on her Instagram page: scroll until 2023 and earlier and you will find images of weddings, graduates, sunsets, children playing in the street, fishermen, large crowds that look like a world cup. different world.
As a woman who had started her career as a photographer, Farsi came to see herself a lot in Hassona. “She was the age of my daughter, so there was this generational gap, but we became friends very quickly and that has become a very deep friendship,” she said. She was amazed at the generosity of Fatem, who distributed food to people, even if she was hungry and found time to teach writing lessons for children with trauma. “I often felt guilty calling him. Here is my life, someone who travels around the world by showing a film at festivals, and she is stuck in Gaza under bombs. ” But Farsi quickly understood that by giving fatem glimpses of her own life, she allowed this curious young woman to see a world beyond her immediate reality. “As much she was my eyes in Gaza, I was a window for her in the outside world.”
Put your soul on your hand and walk Will be presented at first in the sidebar of acid, a parallel selection of independent projects that occur during Cannes. Acid films tend to be a lower profile: they do not have French distribution, and they often do not have major commercial agents or high -power advertising or the stars or summeral rugs. And, given the well-known allergy of the prestigious official competition towards documentaries, ACID is also where some of the best non-fiction work is present during Cannes. (One of the best documentaries on the Ukraine War, Maciek Hamela In declinewas presented in first in 2023.) In a press release shared with Vulture yesterday, ACID recognized that the conversation around this photo had now changed. “We had watched and programmed a film in which the vital force of this young woman was simply miraculous,” he reads. “It is no longer the same film that we support and present in each theater. We all, filmmakers and viewers, must be worthy of its light.”
Farsi had already planned to organize an exhibition of Hassona photographs to coincide with the film’s trip through the Festival circuit. This task now wins an even greater emergency. Fatem could never see the finished film. When Farsi informed her subject and her friend Put your soul on your hand and walk would be first in Cannes, she hoped that the young woman would go to France to be present at the projection; Fatem would only accept if she could return to Gaza afterwards. “I think that for her, it was always abstract,” explains Farsi. “She grew up in Gaza and had never traveled abroad. We have just sent him the invitation. I asked for a visa for her, and I thought, Will we be able to take it out via Rafah? These are all the things that occupied me until yesterday at noon when I learned the news. »»
