A Palestinian artist and photojournalist who is the protagonist of a documentary due to premiere in Cannes in May has been killed in an Israeli air strike.
Fatima Hassouna died with nine members of her family in a direct strike on their home in Gaza City on Wednesday.
Hassouna, who had gained international recognition for her photojournalism capturing the impact on the Gaza Strip’s civilian population of the Israeli military campaign, appears in French-Iranian director Sepideh Farsi’s Put Your Soul On Your Hand And Walk.
Hassouna was killed 24 hours after the documentary was announced as having been selected for parallel Cannes section ACID, running from May 14 to 23 alongside the main festival.
The work revolves around video conversations between Farsi, whose credits include Berlinale-selected animated feature The Siren, and Hassouna. They began when the director connected with the young woman while researching a wider documentary on the events unfolding in Gaza.
“She was such a light, so talented. When you see the film you’ll understand,” Farsi told Deadline. “I had talked to her a few hours before to tell her that the film was in Cannes and to invite her.”
Farsi recounts that Hassouna was open to the idea of attending the screening, as long as she could return to Gaza afterwards.
“She said, ‘I’ll come, but I have to go back to Gaza. I don’t want to leave Gaza,” said Farsi. “I was already in touch with the French Embassy. We’d just started but the process. I was worried about how to get her out and back in safely. I didn’t want to have the responsibility of separating her from her family.”
“Now the whole family is dead. I’m trying to find out if her parents are dead but for sure Fatima and her sisters and brothers are dead. One of the sisters was pregnant. On a video call two days ago, she showed me her belly. It’s so horrible and devastating. Fatima herself had gotten engaged a few months ago.”
Farsi says she now fears that Hassouna may have been targeted because of her photojournalism work.
“I was trying to be a voice and accentuate her and now I don’t know. I even feel guilty… maybe they targeted her because the film was announced. I don’t know. We’ll never know.” she said.
“The Israeli army said it bombed the house because there was a Hamas officer in there, which is totally false. I know the whole family. It’s nonsense. It’s just so devastating.”
Israel’s bombing and invasion of Gaza began in October 2023 in response to Hamas’s October 7 attacks on southern Israel, which killed 1,200 people and resulted in the taking of 251 hostages.
Eighteen months on, at least 51,065 people have died according to figures released by the Hamas-run Gaza health authority, endorsed by the United Nations, although statistical research published by the Lancet medical journal in February suggested this figure may be 15,000 higher.
Another 116,505 people have also been injured in the Gaza Strip, while 90 percent of the territory’s 2.1 million-strong population has been displaced. Of the 251 hostages taken during the October 7 attack, 59 remain in the Gaza Strip, with around 24 of them still believed to be alive.
France’s Association for the Diffusion of Independent Cinema, which organizes the ACID sidebar in Cannes and then promotes the films across the year in cinemas across France, put out a statement expressing its “horror’ at the news of Hassouna’s death.
“We met Fatima Hassouna when we discovered Sepideh Farsi’s film Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk. Her smile was as magical as her tenacity: bearing witness, photographing Gaza, distributing food despite bombs, grief, and hunger. Her story reached us, and we rejoiced at each of her appearances to know she was alive; we feared for her,” it read. “Yesterday, we learned with horror that an Israeli missile targeted her building, killing Fatima and her family.”
“We had watched and programmed a film in which this young woman’s life force was nothing short of miraculous. This is a different film than the one we will carry, support, and present in every theater, starting with Cannes.”
