[Summer 2026]
Put Your Soul on Your Hands and Walk
by Claudia Polledri
Film documentaire, 2025, 111 minutes, anglais et arabe
[EXCERPT]
Premièred at the 2025 edition of the Cannes Festival, Sepideh Farsi’s film Put Your Soul on Your Hands and Walk is at once a challenge and a cinematographic tribute to how photography bears witness. Farsi, an Iranian-born director, documents, in the form of a visual journal, the year’s worth of telephone conversations that she had with Fatma Hassona, a young Palestinian photographer imprisoned in the hell of Gaza. Their exchanges were ended when Fatem, as Farsi called her, died in a bombing on April 16, 2025. Because it was impossible for the foreign press to access Gaza and with the death of numerous journalists (more than two hundred) in Israeli military operations, the film delivers a powerful and unique testimonial to what it means to live every day in a context so violent and difficult to describe. The visual device upon which the storyline is based is simple, consisting essentially of filming the phone screen that linked the two women during their video calls. What emerges is a jerky, uncertain narrative, prey to a glitchy internet connection the precariousness of which mirrors Fatem’s living conditions.
[…]
[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 132 – TABLEAUX ]
[ Complete article in digital version available here: TITRE ARTICLE]
Claudia Polledri is a lecturer at UQAM, art critic, and researcher at the Laboratoire CinéMédias at the Université de Montréal, where she earned a PhD; her dissertation was dedicated to photographic representations of Beirut. She is interested in photography and film in the Middle East (Lebanon, Iran). In 2019, she was the curator of the exhibition Iran: poésies visuelles, presented at the Rencontres de la photographie en Gaspésie.