Hyde Park Pick: Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk

The film offers an intimate, first-hand perspective of life in Gaza, told through a series of video calls between Farsi and a young Palestinian photojournalist, Fatma Hassona. 

Watching Farsi’s film brought to my mind another documentary we played back in 2008, Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country. Burma VJ was made up of footage largely caught on handheld cameras then smuggled out of the country both physically and over the internet. The process enabled the world to peer into and observe the events surrounding the Burmese military regime’s brutal crackdown on peaceful demonstrators protesting about a rise in fuel prices back in 2007. 

I remember watching the film for the first time in the cinema and experiencing a feeling of devastation. It was probably for me one of the first times I’d seen a filmmaker working with the documentary form in that way to capture something so relatively recent and take something I had seen on the news and give it extended time in a cinema space where looking away just isn’t possible. 

That was seventeen years ago now and I’ve got an understanding of the history of documentary that I didn’t have then. Of the great voices who have shaped that discipline and how essential and critical it is as an artform rather than just another genre within the whole world of filmmaking. That being said, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk pulled me right back into the experience of relearning about what film can be. 

The circumstances and nature of its production are significantly different now compared with Burma VJ. In some ways, we have a plethora of information coming out of Gaza and the surrounding territories. Reports from aid agencies, government departments, journalists, private citizens active online; the scale of information one can access about day-to-day life in Gaza is immense. But, perversely, the volume of information and the way in which many of us currently engage with news via our phones and social media, means so much of how we are viewing these horrific events is in snippets. Just little snatches of time spent with people living through a Genocide. 

Farsi’s film isn’t that. It’s a sustained conversation. It’s the back and forth of two people getting to know one another, grappling with communication as they work to find a common tongue. It’s a document capturing incredible intimacy and warmth, a gentle laugh over a favourite type of crisp, over the cat or the handsome relative as they drift into view. The everyday textures of life. But it’s an everyday which no one should ever have to endure. 

The film doesn’t over explain how the conversation came about. From the director’s side, I imagine her experiences growing up in Iran were part of why she wanted to make the film. There she experienced the revolution at 13 before being imprisoned at 16 as a dissident, then leaving at 18 to build a new home in France. It means she understands the pull of a homeland in a way many wouldn’t, and she comes to the story with a depth of compassion and understanding that are rare. At the same time, she perhaps appreciates more than most that only Fatma can tell her story and that the needs of this film are about creating as unfettered work of access as was possible. That’s why the structure of it is so rare in cinema, a camera trained on a phone. The simple framing is interspersed with Fatma’s own photographs, the only glimpse within the film into what she is experiencing when she steps outside and a reminder that the smile she works to wear is rooted in trauma and grief.

Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk is showing at HPPH from Fri 05 Sep. You can book tickets here.