Fatma Hassona has been waiting anxiously for the world premiere of a movie made on her. All that the young photo-journalist who lived in Gaza needed to do was to get out of her country alive. Sadly, she didn’t. Put Your Soul On Your Hand and Walk, a new documentary on her life and work, had its world premiere at the 78th Cannes Film Festival on May 15, without her in attendance.
Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk is one of the several documentaries at the ongoing Cannes festival where non-fiction is turning the big screen into a reality check of the world. Around the world, filmmakers have allowed the camera’s gaze to document facts, from Gaza to Ukraine and Chechnya to the United States.
Directed by Iranian-born filmmaker Sepideh Farsi, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk portrays the fearless work of Hassona in disseminating facts about the war in Gaza to the world outside. Part of the Cannes Film Festival parallel selection, ACID or Association for Diffusion of Independent Cinema, Farsi’s documentary has quickly become one of the most-sought-after films at the festival following Hassona’s death in an Israeli air strike on her family home last month. The military strike, which also killed seven other family members, came after the announcement of the selection of the documentary in Cannes. Hassona was 25 years old.
Mirroring the moment
Among other documentaries that offer testimonies of conflicts, oppression and suppression of freedom, include Haitian director Raoul Peck’s new film, Orwell: 2+2=5, about the relevance of English novelist George Orwell’s works like his seminal novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, containing warning about authoritarianism, Militantropos, which tells the story of Ukrainian soldiers and citizens adjusting their lives to the invasion of their country by Russia that began more than three years ago, and The Six Billion Dollar Man, the story of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s fight for right to information through never-before-seen evidence following his recent release from prison.
“She had just turned 25,” says Paris-based Iranian director Farsi about Gazan photo-journalist Hassona. “I got to know her through a Palestinian friend in Cairo, while I was desperately searching for a way to reach Gaza, seeking the answer to a question both simple and complex. How does one survive in Gaza, under siege for all those years? What is it that Israel wishes to erase in this handful of square kilometres, with bombs and missiles?” she says, referring to Hassona’s work that included capturing moments of life under constant bombing.
An investigation of personal behaviour in the times of war, Militantropos directed by young Ukrainian filmmakers Alina Gorlova, Yelizaveta Smith, Maksym Nakonechnyi and Simon Mozgovyi subtly analyses the psychological effects of violence on human beings. The film’s title combines two Latin words meaning, soldier (milit) and human (antropos) to make sense of the bewildering ability of people to comprehend chaos and destruction. Filmed from day one of the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022, the 114-minute documentary, which is part of the Directors’ Fortnight parallel selection, suggests the new human persona of militantropos allows human beings to choose to accept war as the one and only option to exist.
Orwell’s oracle
Haitian documentary filmmaker Raoul Peck, who directed such acclaimed works as I Am Not Your Negro (2017), which explored the history of racism in America, and last year’s Cannes official selection Ernest Cole: Lost and Found, about one of the most significant photographers who documented the evil of apartheid in South Africa, has returned to the French Riviera with his new documentary, Orwell: 2+2=5. Part of the Cannes Premiere section of the festival, the film focuses on Orwell’s final months and his last novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, which he wrote while living alone in a remote village in Scotland.
Peck, a former culture minister of Haiti, explores the roots of the vital and troubling concepts of Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece that introduced the terms, thoughtcrime, doublespeak, newspeak and Big Brother, to the world. The 119-minute film becomes the director’s attempt to evoke a sense of history, particularly what happens when the world doesn’t heed the warnings of its greatest writers. Peck thus etches a contemporary resonance to his interpretation of Orwellian definition of totalitarianism.
Nearly a year after he was released after spending more than five years in a prison in London following a plea deal with the US, which allowed him to return to his home country, Australia, Julian Assange gets a new documentary. Directed by American filmmaker Eugene Jarecki, The Six Billion Dollar Man traces the saga of the WikiLeaks founder, who was wanted in the US for releasing classified information that changed the rules of journalism. Part of the Cannes festival’s Special Screenings category, The Six Billion Dollar Man challenges the growing attack on press freedom through unreleased archival footage on the life of Assange. Jarecki’s previous works include the Sundance festival’s Grand Jury Prize-winning documentaries Why We Fight (2005) and The House I Live in (2012).
Music & mischief
Bono: Stories of Surrender by Australian filmmaker Andre Dominik is a vivid reimagining of the iconic U2 frontman and rock star activist’s critically acclaimed one-man stage show, Stories of Surrender: An Evening of Words, Music and Some Mischief…, based on his memoir of the same title. The film by Dominik, who directed The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, comes ahead of the release of a new version of the memoir on May 27. Other documentaries at the Cannes festival this year include the Critics’ Week selection, Imago, on life and expectations in Chechnya, the theatre of war for more than two decades, and the Egyptian film Life after Siham, part of ACID selection, directed by Namir Abdel-Messeeh.
French actor-director Julie Gayet is the head of the jury for the Golden Eye Award presented to the Best Documentary Film across the sections and parallel selections at the Cannes fest this year. Cannes Grand Prix-winning director Payal Kapadia had bagged the Golden Eye Award for The Night of Knowing Nothing in 2021. Sundance festival winner Shaunak Sen won the award for All That Breathes in 2022. Another Indian documentary, The Cinema Travellers, received a Jury Special Mention in 2016.
Faizal Khan is a freelancer