Real Lives
Fatma Hassona photographed Gaza for a year and reached Cannes
Image credit: Fatma Hassona — Andrea Ebert / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 · License
Original Reporting
On 15 April 2025 Fatma Hassona learned that a film built entirely around her had been selected for Cannes. She was twenty-five, and she had spent the previous eighteen months photographing Gaza City.
She was killed the next day.
The film premiered in May, and the festival stopped to honour her.
The photographer#
Hassona was born in Gaza City in 1999 and worked as a photojournalist there.
Her subject was civilian life, which in her hands meant two things at once. She photographed the catastrophe directly — children mourning parents, neighbourhoods reduced to rubble, women baking bread in bombed-out courtyards.
And she photographed what refused to stop: children playing in narrow alleys, couples smiling through grief, people holding on to the ordinary dignity of a day.
She wrote poetry too. The instinct in both was the same — to insist that the people in the frame were living, not merely dying.
A film made across a bad connection#
In 2024 the Iranian director Sepideh Farsi wanted to make a film about Gaza and could not enter it.
So she found Hassona, then twenty-four, and began a correspondence. For nearly a year the two spoke by video call, and Farsi filmed the calls.
The practical detail is the one that stays with you. To get a signal strong enough to talk, Hassona had to walk long distances to a friend's house. Every conversation in the film cost her a journey across a city under bombardment.
The result, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, runs 110 minutes and is essentially a portrait assembled out of interruptions — a face on a screen, freezing, returning, laughing, describing what happened that week.
Cannes#
The film was selected for ACID, the independent strand at the Cannes festival, and Hassona was told on 15 April 2025.
On 16 April an Israeli missile struck her building in northern Gaza. She was killed along with nine members of her family.
Cannes issued a tribute in her name. When the film premiered in May the audience was watching a young woman talk about her future in a city she did not leave.
What the film preserved#
There is a particular cruelty in a documentary becoming a memorial between selection and screening, and the people involved have said so plainly.
But the film also did something unusual and valuable. Most images out of Gaza are of Palestinians as the objects of events. Farsi's camera recorded Hassona as a person with opinions, jokes, ambitions and a professional eye — a photographer discussing her own work, not a subject being photographed by someone else.
That is the record she left: eighteen months of pictures of a city, and 110 minutes of herself, taken while she was still deciding what she wanted to do next.
She was twenty-five, and she was very good at her job.
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