The Cannes Film Festival, which begins on Tuesday, will include several movies this year that focus on the war between Israel and the Hamas terror group in Gaza, including a documentary whose protagonist was killed in an Israeli strike last month.
Fatima Hassouna, a 25-year-old Gazan photojournalist, is the main character in Iranian filmmaker Sepideh Farsi’s documentary, “Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk.”
The filmmaker, a refugee from Iran, made the movie from video phone calls with Hassouna over more than 200 days of war.
On April 15, Farsi rang the young Palestinian to tell her the film had been selected for Cannes, and they immediately started trying to arrange for her to attend the French festival.
The next day, an Israeli airstrike killed Hassouna along with 10 relatives in her family home in northern Gaza. Only her mother survived.
The Israel Defense Forces said the strike targeted a Hamas operative involved in attacks on soldiers and civilians.
“Prior to the strike, measures were taken to minimize the risk to civilians, including the use of precision munitions, aerial surveillance, and additional intelligence,” the IDF said.
At the time, Cannes said in a statement that it wished “to express its horror and deep sorrow at this tragedy, which has moved and shocked the entire world,” saying the film’s screening would be “a way of honoring the memory of the young woman, a victim like so many others of the war.”
The war in Gaza started on October 7, 2023, when some 5,000 Hamas-led terrorists invaded southern Israel from Gaza, killing some 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages, 58 of whom are still held in Gaza along with the body of a soldier killed in 2014. Twenty-four of the hostages are officially believed to be alive, though Israel has expressed “grave concern” about three of them.
Farsi’s documentary is likely to draw attention to the war, at a festival where the conflict was already present last year.
At the Berlinale festival in February, British movie star Tilda Swinton lashed out at “internationally enabled mass murder” in Gaza.
Two fiction features at Cannes are also likely to spark discussion of the war, in sections parallel to the main competition.
Gazan twin brothers Arab and Tarzan Nasser will screen “Once Upon a Time in Gaza,” a tale of two friends peddling drugs from a falafel shop in 2007. That year, Hamas forcibly took control of the Strip from the Palestinian Authority, which had governed the area after Israel’s unilateral withdrawal in 2005.
The film — in the Un Certain Regard section — is the latest from the exiled duo to show at the festival, with several of their earlier works set in Gaza but filmed in Jordan.
Meanwhile, Israeli director Nadav Lapid, whose work frequently touches on Israeli identity and the conflict with the Palestinians, will be showing “Yes” in the Directors’ Fortnight program. The film is to follow a jazz musician tasked with setting to music a new national anthem in the aftermath of the October 7 attack.