Put your soul on your hand and walk: the ghost of Fatem Hassona

The Documentary of Sepideh Farsi, presented at Cannes at Acid, takes a heartbreaking turn following the death of her Palestinian heroine.

A name has been haunted Cannes for three days. That of Fatma HassonaFatem, 25, Palestinian photojournalist killed on April 16 by Israeli forces with several members of his family, just two days after the announcement of the selection of the documentary devoted to him. Juliette Binoche in her opening speech had mentioned it, recalling that “Fatma should have been with us this evening. Art remains. He is the powerful testimony of our lives, our dreams and we, spectators, we kiss him. ”

A name therefore, like the symbol of our helplessness.

But since the projection of Put your soul on your hand and walk From Sepideh Farsi, this spectrum, this name has become a face. A face that is now going to obsess us.

During the duration of the film, for an hour fifty, her striking beauty, her magnificent eyes (“not brown, green” she specifies), her so soft voice, her tears so rare, and that stainless smile challenges daily horror. Stuck in her apartment, surrounded by ruins, moving, she describes her life to the filmmaker, sitting on the other side of the world (in Paris, in Canada or Morocco). Hunger, capital tragedies and tiny joys, hope and fatigue …

She is there, incarnation of a people that we could not and especially not wanted to see. She is there, in all the plans of the film or almost. However, this face is constantly hidden. Fatem appears captured through the screen of a smartphone, a sum of pixels that vanish and then reappear miraculously. She disappears because of the failing connections, the time turning or the bombing that punctuates her life. She also seems to dissolve, gradually, under the effect of this famine which makes her “distracted”, as she says herself.

“”I’m trying to find life in this death“, she said in her imperfect English. Or:”I can’t reach the world, but I know it is!”. Today, the world continues to“ be ”, but this face has definitely disappeared. Fatem is dead.

In founding theoretical texts, criticism André Bazin (who has a room with his name in Cannes) developed the idea that photography and cinema actually responded to our obsession with saving beings by fixing them on film, to preserve them from death. You can believe that since this evening, the cinema has saved Fatem. But his destiny is only a plot of that of an entire people.