Windows:
An Interview with Sepideh Farsi
By Nick Kouhi
Iranian filmmaker Sepideh Farsi’s work, in fiction and documentary, speaks to the necessity of human intimacy amid geopolitical strife. An expatriate living in Paris, Farsi has tackled several of Iran’s major historical events in her lifetime, including the Green Movement (Tehran Without Permission, Red Rose) and the Iran-Iraq War (The Siren), through the interpersonal dynamics of ordinary people navigating tumultuous circumstances.This central preoccupation extends beyond Iran, and is imbued with formal urgency, in Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk.
Farsi’s film, which is constructed almost entirely out of her video correspondence with the photojournalist Fatma Hassona, is a stirring portrait of the artist as an activist. In addition to the photographs she captured of the people and places in Gaza, the film sheds light on the poetry and music Hassona created, informed by a devout faith in her home and her neighbors. Showcasing Hassona’s indefatigable optimism and unvarnished candor, Farsi elevates her beyond the grim statistic that she was one of the nearly 250 journalists killed in Gaza since the events of October 7.
Hassona’s murder, which Forensic Architecture’s report in May concluded was premeditated, casts an inescapable pall over the film, which consists of excerpts of her conversations with Farsi in the year leading to her death. Yet in its steadfast attunement to the present tense, the film defies prescriptive fatalism in its treatment of a life defined by boundless curiosity. Each conversation’s complications from technological or language barriers put into sharp relief Hassona’s and Farsi’s shared eagerness to connect beyond any boundaries, physical or digital. Farsi expands her film further by punctuating these exchanges with newscasts, showing how the media rhetorically shape our perception of the new millennium’s first livestreamed genocide.
The film’s visual approach creates a mise-en-abyme, further humanized by the shake of Farsi’s handheld camera as it captures her WhatsApp calls with Hassona. This aesthetic, as Farsi shared with me in our conversation during her visit to the New York Film Festival, is inextricable from her philosophy of filmmaking. By foregrounding her positionality, she compels us to take stock of our own as we bear witness to the vitality of a woman who’s made more than a ghost in the machine. In 2025, the political implications of this method are inexpressibly moving.
Reverse Shot: Your work is characterized by a very tactile intimacy between you and your subjects. How did you navigate around a lot of the limitations in corresponding with someone whom you never met in person while retaining the intimacy that defines your work?
Sepideh Farsi: I usually am very close to my characters. I was just telling another journalist that I cannot film people whom I don't like. But this is pushing it as far as it could go because we were physically as far as it could be. Yet at the same time, we were so close, and this is a very paradoxical state of being. I don’t know how we managed to make that happen, but something definitely happened within the first seconds or minutes of our first conversation. I really got into her life, [and] she got into mine. We became family very quickly. I enjoyed the fact of filming her and talking to her. And I think this is what is conveyed to the viewer. That's why people, when they leave the theater, say, “We met her.” It's like meeting Fatma. I think that the way I filmed, I'm not sure I was so conscious of it, but I can analyze it now with some distance that it puts the viewer in my place.
RS: Recording yourself holding a phone instead of directly uploading a screen capture from your calls makes the viewer constantly aware of their own positionality. Which makes the penultimate shot so striking. Talk about how you got that footage of Gaza from Fatma.
SF: I knew she was a photographer, but she was not recording videos when I met her. I told her, “I would like you to film videos. Make videos for me. Will you be able to?” And she was very shy in the beginning. The first attempts were rather short or too close in the framing. But she did manage. I explained to her what I wanted, and after a few months she sent me this video which she put some time into making. When I received this one, I knew I got what I wanted. I knew it was complicated for her to make such things and also to share them because the size of the file was a lot. So all those things were complications, for her to store it, to share it, to put it on a cloud.
RS: Those technological limitations you’re alluding to make me think more broadly about Francesca Albanese’s report on the tech industry’s complicity in the genocide. How do you reconcile this paradox of using the products of companies that profit from genocide in making your films?
SF: This is an ongoing conversation. When the Green Movement happened, all the non-Iranian journalists were kicked out, put on planes and sent back to their countries within 48 hours. But basically, there were no other professional journalists witnessing the events other than Iranians. So that was the beginning of citizen journalism even before the Arab Spring. Later on, we found that Nokia, which is the phone model that I used for my film Tehran Without Permission, had made a deal with the Iranian regime and had given them the technology to inspect what they call the “deep package inspection.” That meant a deep breach [of] the personal data of all the Iranian users. And it led to the arrest of many people by detecting what they were sending or receiving through their emails and phones. And this was criminal! An official complaint was made, and Nokia just said, “Sorry.” That was it. I read a couple of days ago that Microsoft suspended their collaboration with Israel because they realized that there was a breach in the personal data of Microsoft users. It's the same. I don't have an answer to this. This is an ongoing dilemma.
RS: It doesn't necessarily redeem the complicity of tech, but you and Fatma do utilize technology to speak truth to power. And she even says that this compulsion to document everything is what drives her. How much material did you collate from your conversations with Fatma?
SF: In terms of the number of hours, I don't know exactly. I never really counted them, but I would say around 80 or so. Because I started editing at a very early stage, literally a week or so after the beginning of the shoot, I was gradually building the strongest moments and putting them [into] categories. Of course it changed, it was a work in progress, so there were things that I had put aside and that I brought in later. But some of the conversations [stood] out right from the beginning. There were moments that I knew I wanted to keep. But I think my main guide, my compass, was emotion and intensity. This is what guided me in making my choice to narrow down to a film that was at one point about four hours.
RS: I wanted to ask you about filming the newscasts that occur throughout the film. How many of those reports did you know you were going to be filming beforehand, and how many of them were captured spontaneously?
SF: I had gotten into the habit of filming the TV wherever I was. After October 7, I started compulsively filming different TV channels, depending on where I was. I was doing that already before meeting Fatma so I have hours of TV footage. Some of the moments were outstanding and I knew I wanted to keep them. For instance, the moment when there is the first ceasefire talks last year in May, there is this drone shot of Gaza which is already almost fully destroyed. And when this woman journalist is commenting about the ceasefire, that they were still waiting for the Hamas answer, this shot is there, and underneath you have this teletext. And then we move into Wall Street prognostics of CAC 40, and I was like, “Wow.” It's not only showing what is going on in Gaza during this conflict and comparing different narratives according to the media but also showing the monstrosity of the world where you have 150 people killed and then the Dow Jones is higher or lower. This is the state of our humanity.
RS: Can you speak a little bit to the collaboration you had with your composer Cinna Peyghamy in terms of simulating the ambient sounds of the destruction in Gaza?
SF: He's very talented. He works a lot with electronic music, but he also samples acoustic instruments, such as the Zarb, in his compositions. In this case, I asked him to use military device sounds, so bombardments or drones, and build the layers of his composition with those samples. I think it works very well, because it is insidious. It's never very loud, but you really, I think, physically feel it in a way that is disturbing. I wanted it to be persistently disturbing when the music came, but to remain rather discreet. And the moment when I use sound in a very bold manner is when I put the sounds of explosion on black, which happens twice in the film. I thought this was the only way to use it because I could not see any effect or any image that could be put on it.
RS: That choice speaks to the inadequacy of the image to fully account for the scope of this violence. It’s a dilemma that so many people have normalized images of carnage in the 21st century that it abstracts the value of human life.
SF: We’ve been trained as viewers and consumers all over the world, but especially in the United States, to take these makings with whatever talent, technology, thought and money that comes with it as pure entertainment. Rebuilding scenes of war can be done beautifully in studios now by CGI. This is why I made an animation about the Iraq-Iran War [The Siren]. In live action, it becomes something else. It’s grotesque. It’s not something that is done by a person who’s lived the war. The first time that I ever asked a venue manager to reduce the sound of Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk was here yesterday. Usually, the sound is lower, and I ask the venue managers to increase it. And here, I asked them to reduce it. For me, this film had to be as simple as possible in terms of technology. I did not want to add any effects. It's only the real sounds from Gaza. And I think it was a very important ethical decision to make to keep it raw and real.
RS: I wanted to talk about how Fatma's faith informs her photography. There's this quality of immanence in the people and the places of Gaza featured in her photographs. As someone who's committed to a more secular realism, how did you attempt to honor Fatma’s faith while recognizing your own position in this conversation?
SF: While we were conversing, I think it was important to give her all my ears and my being, myself, to listen to her. This was really key because we differed in our points of view about certain things. Quite a few things, I would say: the role of women in life, tradition, faith. By my listening sincerely to understand her point of view, I think this resulted in such an opening that then we could really converse and exchange. And it was possible to share it with the viewer also because these were open moments. This is a little bit comparable, perhaps, to my way of filming, that instead of just screen recordings, I [shot] handheld. But even the mobile phone, I could have put it on a stick and made it fixed. But I wanted it to be handheld because I wanted it to be dynamic and open. It’s this quality of openness that I wanted to keep throughout the film. There is this nervosity, the vitality of your hand shaking. Sometimes it leads to mistakes, but those mistakes are interesting for me.
RS: As an artist working in a particularly fraught moment for chronicling truth in the midst of massive misinformation, how do you stay grounded?
SF: As a person or as a filmmaker?
RS: Either/or.
SF: I do lose faith in cinema sometimes. I remember having had these feelings earlier, after the revolution in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the first films in Iran were being made. The relationship between the filmmakers and the [state] power is always fascinating, but also dangerous. It troubles my mind, as a person and now as a filmmaker, because a film could be good, but you can betray truth for your own political visions. You can make a very well-crafted film that takes sides insidiously with things that are not correct ethically. I’m constantly hitting against moments in films or books where I feel disgusted. It’s very well written or very well made, but the point of view is not ethically right. How do I keep grounded? I don’t pretend to always be right. But I think it is important to ask ourselves the question often, “Am I on the right path?” I think we are at a moment where we really need to be either cautious or show more integrity. It can't be anything else.