A Documentary About Her Was Accepted Into Cannes. The Next Day, She Was Killed.
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calc(100vw - 30px)" width="1560">In Love+War , a documentary that made its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this week, the Pulitzer Prize–winning conflict photographer Lynsey Addario, who was kidnapped by Iraqi militants and thrown from a jeep in Pakistan, has a simple explanation for why she's spent decades of her life capturing images in war zones. It's not telling the truth or getting the story, although those surely play a part. It's so that people pay attention.
In the movie, directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, we watch as Addario, in the early days of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, rushes into a live-fire zone to grab shots of a mother and two children killed by a mortar round as they attempt to evacuate to Kyiv. And we watch, later on, as Addario and her editor navigate the ethically fraught decision to publish that photograph before the people in it have been identified, running the risk that a family member or loved one might learn of their deaths from the front page of the New York Times. The photograph became a defining image of the war and went viral enough that Addario ended up being interviewed by People , a publication not especially known for its coverage of geopolitical conflict. For a little while, at least, she had turned the eyes of the world toward the war in Ukraine.
It's been harder to keep the world's attention on the war in Gaza, in no small part because it's becoming increasingly difficult to capture images of the conflict. The government of Israel has repeatedly insisted that it does not target journalists—except in cases like last month's, when the Israel Defense Forces claimed that one of six Al Jazeera reporters killed in an intentional attack was the head of a Hamas cell—but the numbers alone are saying: at least 189 journalists and media workers killed since 2023, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, which called it “ the deadliest and most deliberate effort to kill and silence journalists that CPJ has ever documented .” (International journalists have not been allowed into Gaza without a military escort since the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023.) The documentary No Other Land , a collaboration between Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers, won an Oscar in March for its depiction of the toll of the occupation on the West Bank community of Masafer Yatta, but the movie never secured a theatrical or streaming distributor, and it's now virtually impossible to watch in the US Co-director Hamdan Ballal was attacked by a mob in March, and in July, a Palestinian activist who worked on the film was shot and killed during a confrontation with an Israeli settler.
Fatma Hassouna, the Palestinian photographer at the heart of Sepideh Farsi's documentary Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk , was killed by an Israeli airstrike the day after learning that the film had been accepted at Cannes. And because the movie premiered late in the festival when journalists had already started to filter out, that backstory is all most people know. But when I caught up with it in Toronto last week, Put Your Soul on Your Hand turned out to have much more to offer than tragic irony. By the time Farsi, an Iranian who has been living in exile since the 1980s, catches up with Hassouna via one of the video calls that included the vast bulk of the movie, Hassouna's home in the Tuffah neighborhood of north Gaza has been under siege for months. Despite being surrounded by what she describes as “very horrible destruction,” she unfailingly greets Farsi's video calls with a beaming smile, seeming at times almost disconcertingly bubbly. But when that smile persists even as she's describing family members who have been killed in the war, it becomes clear that it's a response to the constant anxiety and trauma of her daily life, a means of settling into a terrible reality without succumbing to it. As she tells Farsi, “We're used to it, but we never get used to it.”
Although Hassouna's death is acknowledged in text at the end of Put Your Soul on Your Hand , the movie doesn't appear to have been altered to foreshadow it. But you can see the light fading from her eyes even before the April 16 airstrike that would take her life at the age of 26 and kill several members of her family. As the war goes on, her calls with Farsi become more infrequent, separated by months instead of days. The gaps seem to be due largely to the destruction of Gaza's infrastructure, as well as the jamming of internet signals Farsi recognizes from her attempts to contact family still in Iran. But Hassouna's hope of restoring her former life is also growing ever more dim, and she grows hazy and subdued as it becomes harder to find enough food to survive on.
Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk —the title is Hassouna's way of describing how Gazans risk their lives every time they step outside their homes—is a rudimentary film in some ways. Farsi shoots Hassouna's video calls directly off her screen using a second iPhone, and those calls are frequently interrupted or distorted. (Their conversations are, barring the odd habibti , conducted entirely in English, but the dialogue is subtitled anyway, often filling in inaudible or garbled speech and occasionally correcting when Hassouna seems to land on the wrong word.) But the difficulty of connection, the fact that Farsi has to grab every chance to talk even if it means propping a phone up on her laptop screen or squatting on the floor of a rented room, becomes a powerful through line, a constant reminder of just how challenging, and frustrating, it can be to transmit the lives of people in Gaza to the outside world.
The Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania takes a different tack with The Voice of Hind Rajab , which was awarded the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival this weekend. The movie is built around a terrible real-life incident: During the IDF's push into Gaza City in January 2024, a 6-year-old girl was trapped in a bullet-riddled car under heavy fire, spending several terrified hours on the phone with dispatchers from the Red Crescent (the regional equivalent of the Red Cross) in Ramallah as they tried to secure military approval to send an ambulance to rescue her. All told, both she and two ambulance drivers were killed, along with the six family members inside the car who had already been shot dead when she placed her first call. The IDF denied that its troops were in the area, but a Washington Post investigation concluded that “Israeli armored vehicles” had been present, and the sound of gunfire captured in a recording of Hind Rajab's call was “consistent with Israeli weapons.” According to an Al Jazeera investigation, the car in which her body was found 12 days later had been shot 335 times .
Dramatizing the death of a child, even for the purpose of decrying it, is ethically murky at best, obscene at worst, but Ben Hania keeps her distance from Rajab herself. Her movie is set entirely in a re-creation of the Red Crescent call center 50 miles away from Gaza City, where a group of increasingly desperate dispatchers spends hours working to get permission for an ambulance to make an eight-minute drive. The call center workers are played by actors, including The Syrian Bride ’s Clara Khoury. But when we hear Rajab on the phone, it's her real voice, taken from the recordings that have since spread all over the world.
Listening to the last recorded words of a terrified little girl surrounded by the bloody corpses of her extended family would be almost unbearable in their raw state. But the fictional frame allows us just enough distance to hear them without being destroyed—or, worse, shutting down. Taking the perspective of the call-center workers puts the audience in the position of the people crying out to those with the power to help her, and feeling the devastation of the bureaucracy and indifference they receive in response. At one point, someone suggests posting a clip of Rajab's voice on social media in order to spur a response, and Omar (Motaz Malhees), the dispatcher who takes her first call, cries out, “You really think the voice of a little girl will spark their empathy?”
The Voice of Hind Rajab , of course, is hoping that it will. (It has certainly sparked strong feelings: Rumors that juror Fernanda Torres threatened to quit unless the film was given Venice's Golden Lion, the festival's top prize, were so persistent that jury President Alexander Payne had to deny them at the press conference announcing the winners.) A filmmaker who has worked in both fiction and documentary—and been nominated for both international-film and documentary Oscars—Ben Hania periodically reminds the audience just how faithful the re-creation they're watching is. She fills the screen with the audio waveform of Rajab's voice, the digital file name stamped in the corner, and occasionally allows the voices of the real dispatchers the actors are playing to overlap with their dialogue. The movie keeps reminding us how close we are to what actually happened, climaxing with a shot that blends real video and the actors' reenactment. But the heart of the conflict, like Rajab herself, is impossible to reach.
Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk and The Voice of Hind Rajab are one-sided accounts. That's not a value judgment, just a description. They are movies in films in which Jewish Israelis do not appear, and, in Hind Rajab , are rarely even explicitly mentioned. (When an anguished Omar asks his boss what could be holding up the process of coordinating safe passage for a 6-year-old girl, his boss responds, essentially, What do you think? ) Even when she ventures outside, there are no soldiers in Fatma Hassouna's video calls, just the omnipresent hum of drones and Apache helicopters, and when she talks about Oct. 7, it's in terms that verge on pride: “We showed the world … that we can fight.” Sepideh Farsi, who fled Iran after the Islamic Revolution, doesn't press her subject on the point, but she also didn't cut it out of her film. Not every image that comes out of Gaza will lend itself to a simple moral calculus. But the situation will only get worse if we turn our eyes away, or if we have nothing to turn them to.
