Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk

There have been hundreds of news segments, documentaries, investigations, and other pieces of reporting and storytelling produced about the impact of the Israeli war on Gaza in the last two-and-a-half years. By virtue of reality, most of those pieces depict Palestinians in misery, anguish, and death. Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk does something different. Iranian director Sepideh Farsi’s documentary is conducted over cellphone calls to Palestinian photojournalist and poet Fatma Hassona, a beaming 25-year-old certain that her Islamic faith and the resilience of the Palestinian people will help her and her family endure this aggression. She shares her poetry and her photography over choppy phone calls to Farsi, and the two women just talk: about whether Fatma’s family has been able to find any food, about how close Israeli bombing is to Fatma’s home, about what she wants to do with her life after the war ends. They become friends, but still, there’s a distance between the two that the documentary itself reflects—Farsi can never really understand what Fatma is living through, and with its literal focus on the difficulty Farsi increasingly has in reaching Fatma, the documentary captures the limits of connection. But it’s also a reminder of something often overlooked in media portrayals of Gaza: that Palestinians also live. Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk is a testament to Fatma’s hope for a better reality for herself, and a memorial to what we all lost when her smile was extinguished. For its complex documentation of what hope looks like in a hopeless situation, and its empathetic depiction of Palestinian identity, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk wins a Peabody Award.