Sepideh Farsi’s video calls with the late Palestinian photographer Fatma Hassona vividly document daily life in Gaza under Israel’s unrelenting violence.
“Meeting her was like a mirror held in front of me that made me realise how both our lives were conditioned by walls and wars,” notes Sepideh Farsi early on in her documentary about the 24-year old Palestinian photographer Fatma Hassona, which is made up almost entirely of video calls between the two. In Farsi’s film, walls manifest in the form of screens as she opts for filming her smartphone during these calls, as well as her laptop and television screens with snippets of news broadcasts. It’s by no means a refined approach, but as the images of genocide that we’re confronted with on a daily basis are mediated to us by our screens, it’s a decision that makes perfect sense. Here, the frame of Farsi’s smartphone screen – where we see an always-smiling Fatma, blurry, pixelated, interrupted by poor connection – is yet another wall that lays bare the infrastructures of occupation that compress time and keep Fatma so far out of our reach.
Albeit somewhat hindering the affective impact of Fatma’s photography and poetry, Farsi’s unfiltered, raw approach mirrors the nature of our own spectatorship. On this side of the screen, we cannot stop Palestinians from starving, from grieving, from dying at the hands of genocidal maniacs. At the same time, it is complete absurdity to not be talking about anything other than Palestine. All we can do is refuse to look away. In bearing witness, we can regard the pain of others as our own.