THEMOVIES

Through two hundred video calls, filmmaker Sepideh Farsi speaks with Fatima Hassouna, a 25-year-old photojournalist trapped in Gaza City. Farsi, herself an exile from Iran now living and working in the West, connects with Fatima through intermediaries. “It was as if I were looking into a mirror,” she says at the film’s opening. Recorded on a smartphone, their conversations produce unstable images that make the fragility and inhumanity of daily life palpable. What emerges is a devastating account of powerlessness in the face of the genocide against the Palestinian people—closer than any outsider could possibly come. Over time, Fatima becomes someone we come to know and admire for her resilience. The impact deepens as she describes losing clarity of thought from hunger and being paralyzed by the constant roar of drones, helicopters, and bombers overhead. Shortly before the film was selected for the Cannes Film Festival, Fatima and her family were killed by Israeli bombs