The rule is this: don’t spoil movies by giving away the ending, even if the events depicted are part of the historical record. But in the case of this devastating documentary, knowing what’s coming at the end is a radical enhancement, a chilling message from the movie’s future that makes you read everything differently.
So here’s the big reveal: Fatma Hassona, the young Palestinian woman in this film, to whom director Sepideh Farsi talks to via video calls over nearly a year, is now dead, killed on 16 April by an Israeli airstrike along with several members of her family. In fact, the last we see of Hassona is her being told by Farsi that the film we’ve just been watching will be shown at the Cannes film festival. This prompts a conversation about whether Hassona will attend the premiere (“Of course!” she says, optimistically) and perhaps use that trip as an opportunity to leave Gaza for good. She demurs politely, insisting that Gaza is her home even if everything and everyone is destroyed.
This last conversation resonates so deeply because Gaza is indeed being ground down to dust. But it’s the audacious austerity of Farsi’s film-making that really makes the material sing. As that cheery last conversation ends with a humdrum discussion of passports and a promise, impossible to keep, to talk again soon, the screen fades to black and bare, factual subtitles reveal Hassona’s fate. There’s no soaring string soundtrack, no final on-the-nose irony, just the palpable absence of Hassona’s almost always smiling face, her laughter, and her irrepressible optimism.
The film itself consists almost entirely of these often halting video-call conversations, interspersed with news reports that Farsi films of live broadcasts – and, most importantly, the digital photographs Hassona took herself nearly every day. She had aspirations to become a professional photographer, and clearly she had an eye. The images show Palestinians in Gaza quietly getting on with life against the frayed and collapsing backdrop of the city.
One of the last clips is a long drive, presumably on a motorcycle or bicycle, through streets full of ruins, with kids playing, dust-covered cars everywhere, all bedded by snatches of Hassona’s earlier conversations. The one that will really get you is the call back to the time when she tried to assuage Farsi’s feelings of inadequacy for not being able to help Hassona and her community more. “It’s enough that you’re listening to me,” Hassona says. “I’m so glad to be here and I’m so glad that you are beside me.” We might question whether it is enough that this film memorialises her, but her memory will be a blessing.
• Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk is in UK and Irish cinemas from 22 August.
