A documentary whose main subject, 25-year-old photojournalist Fatima Hassouna, was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza weeks before it premiered at Cannes stunned viewers into silence at the festival on Thursday.
As the cinema lights came back on, filmmaker Sepideh Farsi held up an image of the young Palestinian woman killed with younger siblings on April 16, and encouraged the audience to stand up and clap to pay tribute.
“To kill a child, to kill a photographer is unacceptable,” Farsi said.
Photo: Reuters
“There are still children to save. It must be done fast,” the exiled Iranian filmmaker added.
With Israel banning foreign media from entering the besieged Palestinian territory, Farsi last year reached out to Hassouna through video call, and turned more than 200 days of conversations into the documentary Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk.
In often disjointed discussions due to bad Internet connection, Hassouna smiles widely and bravely says that she is ok.
She recounts how she dreams of eating chicken amid dire food shortages, how she lost 14 relatives including a one-year-old in Israeli bombardment and what she photographed that day.
In one of her many pictures edited into the film, a little girl laughs on her father’s lap in front of a tower block reduced to rubble.
However, in another, a boy aims a water hose at the bloodied pavement, trying to clean away the remains of his own family.
A day after Hassouna was told the documentary had been selected for a sidebar section at the world’s most prestigious film festival, an Israeli missile pummeled her home in northern Gaza, killing her and 10 relatives.
Israel has claimed it was targeting Palestinian militant group Hamas.
“Why would you kill someone and decimate an entire family just because she was taking photos?” Farsi asked.
“They were normal people. Her father was a taxi driver, she was a photographer, her sister was a painter and her little brother was 10 years old,” she said. “My heart goes out to her mother, who lost six of her children, her husband and her home.”
On Thursday, British filmmaker Ken Loach — a double Palme d’Or winner — on X called on people to honor Hassouna and fellow Palestinian journalists “who gave their lives to bear witness to mass murder.”
Tens of thousands have been killed in Gaza and an aid blockade threatens famine, while Israeli leaders continue to express a desire to empty the territory of Palestinians as part of the war sparked by Hamas’s unprecedented Oct. 7, 2023, attack.
Reporters Without Borders estimated about 200 journalists have been killed in 18 months of Israeli strikes on Gaza.
As the Gaza death toll mounts, with rescuers saying 120 people were killed in Israeli strikes on Thursday alone, the conflict has cast a shadow over Cannes.
Several actors have walked its red carpet wearing Palestinian flags pinned to their jackets, while others have sported a yellow ribbon for Israeli hostages still held in Gaza.
Exiled Gazan filmmakers Arab and Tarzan Nasser on Monday are to screen Once Upon a Time in Gaza, a portrait of two friends set in 2007, the year Hamas started tightening its grip on the territory.
On the eve of the festival, Schindler’s List actor Ralph Fiennes and Hollywood star Richard Gere were among more than 380 figures to slam what they see as silence over “genocide” in Gaza.
The English Patient actor Juliette Binoche, who heads the main competition jury, paid homage to Hassouna on opening night.
Sepideh said she had believed until the very end that Hassouna “would survive, that she would come [to Cannes], that the war would stop.”
“But reality caught up with us,” she said.
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
COMPETITION: The US and Russia make up about 90 percent of the world stockpile and are adding new versions, while China’s nuclear force is steadily rising, SIPRI said Most of the world’s nuclear-armed states continued to modernize their arsenals last year, setting the stage for a new nuclear arms race, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said yesterday. Nuclear powers including the US and Russia — which account for about 90 percent of the world’s stockpile — had spent time last year “upgrading existing weapons and adding newer versions,” researchers said. Since the end of the Cold War, old warheads have generally been dismantled quicker than new ones have been deployed, resulting in a decrease in the overall number of warheads. However, SIPRI said that the trend was likely
NUCLEAR WARNING: Elites are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers, perhaps because they have access to shelters, Tulsi Gabbard said After a trip to Hiroshima, US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday warned that “warmongers” were pushing the world to the brink of nuclear war. Gabbard did not specify her concerns. Gabbard posted on social media a video of grisly footage from the world’s first nuclear attack and of her staring reflectively at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. On Aug. 6, 1945, the US obliterated Hiroshima, killing 140,000 people in the explosion and by the end of the year from the uranium bomb’s effects. Three days later, a US plane dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, leaving abut 74,000 people dead by the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi is to visit Canada next week, his first since relations plummeted after the assassination of a Canadian Sikh separatist in Vancouver, triggering diplomatic expulsions and hitting trade. Analysts hope it is a step toward repairing ties that soured in 2023, after then-Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau pointed the finger at New Delhi’s involvement in murdering Hardeep Singh Nijjar, claims India furiously denied. An invitation extended by new Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to Modi to attend the G7 leaders summit in Canada offers a chance to “reset” relations, former Indian diplomat Harsh Vardhan Shringla said. “This is a
RSS