Palestinian journalist and star of Cannes documentary killed in Israeli missile strike

Fatma Hassona, the Palestinian journalist and star of documentary Put Your Soul On Your Hand And Walk, has died in an Israel missile strike aged 25.

Hassona was featured in the film, which was selected for Cannes’ ACID, an independent association that runs parallel to Cannes. ACID reported to Variety that Hassona sadly died with her family in a building targeted by a missile.

“Her smile was as magical as her tenacity: bearing witness, photographing Gaza, distributing food despite the bombs, mourning and hunger. We heard her story, rejoiced at each of her appearances to see her alive, we feared for her,” ACID said in a statement.

“We had watched and programmed a film in which this young woman’s life force seemed like a miracle. This is no longer the same film that we are going to support and present in all theaters, starting with Cannes. All of us, filmmakers and spectators alike, must be worthy of her light.”

Meanwhile, the documentary’s director Sepideh Farsi also commented on Hassona’s death, quoting an excerpt from Hassona’s ‘The Man Who Wore His Eyes’:

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“Maybe I’m ushering in my death
now
Before the person standing in front of me loads
His elite sniper’s rifle
And it ends
And I end.
Silence.

“Those are the words of Fatma Hassona, or Fatem to her friends, excerpted from a long poem called ‘The Man Who Wore His Eyes’,” Farsi wrote. “A poem that smells of sulfur, that smells of death already, but that is also full of life, as was Fatem, until this morning, before an Israeli bomb took her life, as well as the lives of her entire family, reducing their home to rubble.

Farsi went on to say that she met Hassona through a Palestinian friend in Cairo, as Farsi was seeking an answer to the question: “How does one survive in Gaza, under siege for all these years? What is the daily life of Palestinian people under war?”

Explaining that she couldn’t find the answer in the news or media, and unable to travel to Gaza, Farsi filmed her conversations with Hassona. “Fatem became my eyes in Gaza and I, a window open on the world. I filmed, catching the moments offered by our video calls, what Fatem was offering, fiery and full of life. I filmed her laughs, her tears, her hopes and her depression. I followed my instinct. Without knowing beforehand where those images would lead us. Such is the beauty of cinema. The beauty of life.”

Farsi added: “Every day, I thought about Palestinians outside Gaza, far from their families, and I wondered how they could go on living with such anguish. And for that as well, I had no answer. I told myself I had no right to fear for her, if she herself was not afraid. I clung to her strength, to her unwavering faith.”

The bombing on Palestine began on October 7, 2023; a total of 50,933 people have been killed and 116,045 woundd since the start of the war, according Al Jazeera (April 12).

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