The emotions are high in the demonstration of the documentary about the photojournalist Fatma Hassona, killed in Gaza

She should have been there, but instead Iranian filmmaker Sepideh Farsi stopped a photo. It was a young woman with a bright smile, her gentle face from a veil. At 8:00 p.m. in the Olympia Cinema Hall in Cannes, on Thursday, May 15th, the audience rose as one to honor the memory of the photojournalist Fatma Hassona of Gaza, also known as “Fatem”. On April 16, at the age of 25, she died together with several of her relatives in the bombing of the building in which she lived, in the district of Al-Tuffa in the northern part of the city of Gaza.

In such moments, the festival audience feels both concerned and powerless. The President of the Jury of the Cannes competition, Juliette Binoche, paid tribute to “Fatem” during the opening ceremony on May 13 the day before Vanity fair And liberationMore than 300 cinema figures (Pedro Almodovar, David Cronenberg, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Ruben Ostlund etc.) condemned the “Silence” about Gaza.

The name of Hassona was added to the list of around 200 journalists who have been killed as retaliation for Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023 since the beginning of the Israeli soil offensive. Since this date, Hassona had documented daily life for the residents of the enclaves, which Israel prohibits foreign journalists from giving access.

Slow disappearance of a picture

What remains is the documentary in which she is the heroine Put your soul on your hand and govon Farsi, who was born in 1965 and is a refugee in France. The film was presented in the official selection of acid (Independent Film Association for Distribution), which ran in parallel to the festival and is to be released on September 24th in French cinemas that are distributed by New Story. Hassona’s death occurred the day after the film was selected in Cannes.

Farsi made it clear that “Fatems” was targeted by an Israeli attack at home and looked at the conclusions of forensic architecture at Goldsmith’s University in London. This collective of researchers and architects uses spatial data to examine state violence, human rights violations and their reports in court. “I don’t know how to describe people who give such orders to eliminate a young woman who only takes photos. Are these pictures really so annoying? I think so,” said the filmmaker.

For the duration of the festival, the photos of Hassona in the Majestic Hotel in the Croisette and in the Palestinian pavilion can be seen in the Village International. “Fatma said: ‘I want a loud, spectacular death, I don’t just want to be a number on the last page of a newspaper.’ (…) You will meet you, she is brilliant, “added the director before the demonstration.

Farsi filmed her conversations with “Fatem” for a year that had never seen anything other than Gaza Strip. The film tells the history of friendship between the two women who exchanged news and spoke about video calls. Farsi must always be afraid of her friend’s life, push away the opportunity and believe in miracles and felt that this friendship film would also be a cinematic tombstone. It is not certain whether an audience has experienced something like this before: the duration of a film as a countdown, in which every second life, joy, takes away from the face of a young woman. A film that essentially presents the slow disappearance of a picture.

Small pixelated window

Before she was murdered, everything had already been taken from “fatem”, “the big things and the little things”. Eating, carefree moments, the future. Like all Gazans, she had lost dozens of relatives who were killed under the Israeli army bomb attacks. But “Fatem” still managed to smile. This is a common property of great documentaries about the war population destroyed by death: they are also great films about life. Because before the disappearance, “Fatem” appears and in front of our eyes in this film, which tries to record the thoughts and life of a young Gazan forever and to connect us to whatever is missing from the area of ​​information: intimacy, the impression of touching life and everyone else.

Put your soul on your hand and go Is the story of a young girl who lives strangely: she writes poems and dreams of travel. From this small, pixelated window in which she is in the prison, “Fatem” tells her story and draws our attention to the slightest thing that penetrates the frame: the different colored veils, which in different ways the face and shy smile of a younger brother (also killed), climbing, rising and rising the bomb building, a packing pack.

In contrast to her, Farsi, iPhone in hand also offers a window in its immediate surroundings: opulent, well -decorated apartments in Canada, Cairo and Paris; A cat waiting for the door to be opened; Freedom of movement; Electricity; And a peace that usually doesn’t need words, but here cruelly swings. The film hangs entirely on the terribly fragile thread that connects a peaceful world with a corner of hell shortly before breaking.

Communication also depends on a thread, subject to the mood of the internet connection in Gaza: very often, freezed, “fatems”, disappears, loosens into a pixel pixel, the crazy poetry of the digital, which speaks of death here. Sentences fragments are swallowed, the ties. Black screen.

Farsi wanted to record this, this ghost, this low definition with its sparkling texture, which surprisingly conveys the tragedy of “Fatem”. The young woman smiles less and less and fades and feels distracted, explains her and prevents her from reacting to events. Her Iranian girlfriend tells her: “I lose you.”