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Sepideh Farsi – “With Fatem, every moment was precious”

The French-Iranian filmmaker speaks about her “miracle” encounter with 24-year-old Gaza photographer Fatma Hassouna, their 11-month remote friendship, and why the film, but also Hassouna’s murder, bear witness to the genocidal reality of Gaza


11/04/2026

Iranian-born filmmaker Sepideh Farsi experienced revolution and imprisonment before fleeing Iran at 18. Now based in Paris, she has directed many films —including Tehran Without Permission, Red Rose, and The Siren. In Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, Farsi  documents her friendship with the young Gaza photojournalist Fatma Hassouna, as captured over 11-months of video calls – until the young woman was killed alongside her family in an Israeli air strike, the day after she heard their film was selected for the Cannes film festival.

Sepideh will be in Berlin this week, where Tehran Without Permission and Put your Soul on your Hand and Walk will be screened. Following’s Wednesday’s screening of Tehran Without Permission (Lichtblick, 8pm). Sepideh will be taking part in a talk moderated by journalist Nadja Vancauwenberghe. In preparation for these events, here is an unpublished interview between Nadja and Sepideh from June 2025.

In April 2024, French-Iranian filmmaker Sepideh Farsi set out to make the journey into Gaza, determined “to put faces” on the casualty numbers she read in the western media. She never made it past the Israeli blockade, but what she today calls a “miracle” did happen:  in Cairo she made the e-acquaintance of Fatma Hassouna who would become her “eyes in Gaza” during an 11-month FaceTime friendship — an intimate connection abruptly severed when Israeli missiles killed Hassouna on April 16, 2025, just one day after the happy news of their film’s selection at Cannes film festival. 

This didn’t prevent Fatma Hassouna from being present at Cannes last year: a poignant tribute by Juliette Binoche in her opening speech, and the standing ovation following a very emotional film premiere raised the young woman to world’s attention. Fatma’s huge smile on Farsi’s phone became the symbol of a whole people’s resilience in the face of annihilation. 

One year and one shaky ceasefire down the road, Farsi’s doc hasn’t lost an inch of its poignancy, nor, sadly, of its topicality. It is a haunting tribute to a lost friend, to a bright, talented young woman – one of the over 72,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza since October 2023.

Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk testifies to the power of documentary film to bear witness when other media won’t : Hassouna’s wish to have her “death louder than bombs” has been fulfilled.

It’s April 2024, 6 months into the war, and you decide to take the journey into Gaza. Why? 

It had to do with a personal need, an urgency, which grew over the months. Past the initial shock of the October 7th attacks,  we were now realising the casualties were mainly the Palestinian civilians, women and children. And yet, the Palestinian voice was missing in media narratives. We had the European point of view, the Western, the American, and the Israeli point of views, and very rarely, almost never, the Palestinian point of view. This piece of the puzzle was missing, so I had the urge to go and find out for myself and then, maybe, respond as a filmmaker. In our big media, Palestinians were just casualty numbers — I wanted to put faces on them.

There were images from Gaza all over our social media, to the point people talked of the“first live-streamed genocide”… 

Well, I did get images but I didn’t get the voice, the face – the individual stories were missing. And there’s also the distance, because when you see images of such brutality and violence, wherever in the world, after some time one gets numb as a viewer. That’s what happened with Syria, and again, up to a point, what has been happening with Ukraine. War becomes a banality, and this is really dangerous, and I wanted to fight this as best as I could with my own means as a filmmaker.  

Did you really think you had a chance of getting in, considering Gaza had been under a media blockade since October? What were you hoping to do there? 

I wasn’t sure of course but I wanted to try my luck — I thought: I’m a filmmaker, I have a French passport, perhaps I can get a laissez-passer from the French embassy – this was still fresh, in April 2024. I’d done this kind of urgency filmmaking, cinema d’urgence before,  in Tehran Without Permission, also with my documentary Harat, and in the other film I shot in Afghanistan, Seven Veils. So I am used to working undercover and reacting to my surroundings. But the roads were blocked, and I was stranded in Cairo, so I started filming Palestinian refugees who’d just arrived from Gaza and collecting their stories.

It’s in Cairo you ‘met’ Fatma, right? 

Yes, while there I befriended a young man from north Gaza who started to tell me about one of his friends who was still there, a very special, brilliant person, full of energy, and a talented photographer. And he said: “you have to meet her online and then you will see”. That’s how I got introduced to Fatem. 

At which point did it become clear that Fatma was that “face” you were looking for? That your video calls would become a film, of which she would be your one and only protagonist?

There was a first phone call. We talked and I asked whether she’d be willing to do a video. She immediately said yes — she just needed a couple of hours to walk to a place where she could connect. On that very first video call, which is the beginning of the film, I immediately understood she was special, that something was happening, and that I had to film every bit of this. Something immediately clicked. I related to her. She was like a mirror to me. She reminded me of my young years in Iran, when I was blocked there, when I went to jail. You see in the film her own feeling of being locked up in Gaza which she describes as a small box in the big world, “a prison“. 

From this point on, every moment was precious – especially because I never knew when we could talk again, when she’d be able to reconnect, if the connection would be good enough for a video, or even, you know, if she would be alive the next hour, or day, or night. We now have proof that those were, indeed, precarious moments. So, yes, it all happened very quickly. I was responding to the urgency of the situation  

This urgency is reflected in the radical simplicity of your set up: she, you and your phones, as filmed by another phone, with very little intrusion from the outside world. Was this formal simplicity clear from the get-go? 

Yes, I immediately knew it had to be filmed on a mobile, and with a mobile. The idea of using a second phone to film that phone, and be at that level, and filming the screen, for her and for me, was also a very quick spur-of-the-moment decision. You almost see that moment when I flip the phone, and I say: “I’m going to film this”, it was instant. I had the gut feeling this was the right thing to do, and I followed my instinct. Later I had to make drastic decisions because I had many hours of footage. While editing, I was aiming to make something very simple, formally, to achieve this radical simplicity that is a bridge between the emotion I wish to convey and the aesthetics I want.  

You  said many times that Fatma Hassouna became your eyes in Gaza.  Can you tell us more about this idea of bearing witness in a situation of media blackout and how your collaboration could achieve that?

Fatem’s story is of course hers, but she’s also representing those 55,000 Palestinians who’ve been killed by now –  in fact many more, as we know there are many people unaccounted for in official figures. 

So yes, I think this film is bearing witness — all the way up to Fatem’s murder. I say “ murder”, because, since that investigation by Forensic Architecture, we now have evidence that her death was a targeted attack by precision-guided munitions, namely two missiles that were dropped by a drone on her house, crossed all the floors from the top and exploded on the second floor where she and her family were living. I wasn’t imagining that she could be targeted because of her photos, or because of a film, until the report became public, and I learned those horrible details. But of course she’s not the only one. That Israel can keep on killing Palestinian journalists —  over 220 journalists in 23 months,  is unbelievable. It’s outrageous. 

What can a documentary like yours express that we don’t get otherwise? 

The human truth of those who live there — the chance to meet someone at eye-level and to come as close as we possibly can to their reality, despite the physical distance imposed by the media blockade. I tried to make this leap, something that you do not get through the media, something that you do not get through films that are done with big means and long processes. My film gives a very intimate insight into the life of a young woman in Gaza, through long hours of conversation, with me trying to be as close as possible to her through our only means of exchange – a phone.

Fatem became a very special person in my life, she became a friend. I tried to shed light on her story and, through her, the hardship of the Palestinians in Gaza. I tried to make an honest film.

What would you answer to people dismissing your film as one-sided? 

It’s an intimate film, a human gaze on a person’s story. It just so happens that this person is a young woman, Palestinian, born in Gaza, 25 years earlier, without ever being able to go out, and that she was a photojournalist, an artist, a writer, a great grand person. And that she was killed before we could ever see each other in person. It was a miracle that I met her. I had the honor of spending time with her. She will always be a part of my life. Now, if that’s one-sided, be it.

Wednesday, 15th April, 8pm: Tehran Without Permission followed by a talk with director Sepideh Farsi, moderated by jour­nalist Nadja Van­cau­wen­berghe. Lichtblick KinoThursday, 16th April, 6pm Put your Soul on your Hand and Walk, Sputnik Kino

Berlin Freedom of Information Act gutted by Senate

A new low for transparency and government accountability


09/04/2026

On March 26, the CDU/SPD-led Berlin parliament passed a law that significantly weakens the city’s Freedom of Information Act (IFG).  

The amendments to the IFG were rushed through, despite criticism from journalists, transparency experts, and thousands of petitioners who warned that the changes would undermine government accountability and make it harder to expose political misconduct.

Under the new law, entire sectors—including public transportation, culture, and media—may be excluded from the scope of information requests.

Alongside cultural censorship, the ongoing suppression of pro-Palestinian activism, and the expansion of police surveillance, this rollback of transparency represents a new step in the erosion of democracy in Germany: another stage in the drift toward a militarized security state.

What is the Berlin Freedom of Information Act?

The Berlin Freedom of Information Act (IFG), in force since 1999, gives citizens the right to request information held by Berlin’s public authorities. 

An IFG request can be used to obtain a wide range of information: government contracts, official correspondence, studies, and much more.

Considered one of the most transparent freedom of information laws in Germany, the IFG is a powerful democratic tool that helps journalists and activists monitor government actions and hold authorities accountable. 

According to the law text itself, the purpose of the IFG is to “enable public scrutiny of government actions.”

The anti-antisemitism funding fiasco and the shadow of the Vulkan group

The Senate justifies the changes to the IFG on the grounds of civil protection (Katastrophenschutz). In particular, it points to the attack on Berlin’s power grid, framing it as evidence of a “changed security situation”. 

As a reminder, the January 2026 arson attack on a cable bridge was claimed by the Vulkangruppe—a purported left-wing group that appears to have little recognition or support within Berlin’s broader left. Shortly after, a second statement denied that the “real” Vulkangruppe was behind the attacks.

Beyond the murky authorship of the attacks, experts have pointed out that the attackers did not obtain information about their target through an IFG request. They didn’t need to: the bridge was clearly visible for miles and had been barely secured for months. 

Rather than a response to the power grid attack, the changes to the IFG appear to be part of a general rightward shift as well as a direct reaction to the so-called “CDU-Fördergeldaffäre”. 

This “funding scandal” exposed that public money meant for projects combating antisemitism was funnelled towards friends of the CDU, many of which lack relevant expertise. CDU members of parliament, working together with Culture Senators Joe Chialo and his successor, Sarah Wedl-Wilson, channelled around €3 million to projects they had selected themselves, bypassing usual oversight. Most of this money ended up benefiting questionable projects such as The Nova Exhibition, which many critics have described as a form of trauma-exploiting genocide propaganda. 

The transparency platform Frag Den Staat published thousands of documents related to the affair—all obtained through IFG requests. 

These types of documents will likely no longer be available to journalists going forward. 

Despite the fact that the changes to the IFG seem to be a response to the CDU’s public embarrassment for the funding scandal, they are framed as something else: a necessary precaution to fight left-wing terrorism. This has, by now, become a familiar pattern in Germany as well as in France or the US: using the spectre of the “radical left”—even when all serious studies show that the far-right is the only real threat—to justify passing laws that curtail the freedom of all.

A weakened transparency law

So, what has changed?

The amendments to the IFG introduce new reasons to reject information requests. 

The law will no longer apply to requests about facilities that are deemed critical infrastructure according to the Berlin Disaster Protection Act. This includes facilities from the following sectors: energy, information technology and telecommunications, transport and traffic, waste management, health, water, food, media and culture, or finance and insurance.

Additionally, the law now excludes from public access any information about civilian infrastructure important for civil defence or with military relevance (e.g. bridges). 

From public transport to hospitals (and, yes, cultural funding), many areas of public life could now fall under the scope of these exemptions—meaning citizens might no longer be able to request information about them through the IFG.

In effect, this shift could lead to sector-wide blanket refusals, making it much more difficult for journalists and activists to expose political misconduct and uncover scandals such as the so-called “Fördergeldaffäre”. 

Grinding down democracy: criticism ignored while other states plan similar laws

The changes to the IFG were heavily criticised before the vote. A coalition of 38 civil society organizations (including Frag Den Staat, Amnesty International, Wikimedia and Chaos Computer Club) sent an open letter to Berlin’s governing parties, urging them to halt the reform.

They warned that the amendments would significantly restrict democratic oversight while being unnecessary since existing rules already allow authorities to withhold information for security reasons. 

A petition launched by Frag Den Staat gathered nearly 20,000 signatures. Even the Berlin Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information, Meike Kamp, expressed concerns that the new law would mark a serious step backward for transparency and freedom of information in Berlin.

Despite these critics, the reform was pushed through without much regard for public consultation. Meanwhile, other states such as Thuringia and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern are already planning similar changes to their freedom of information acts.

Freedom of information requests are an important part of democratic life, as they give people a way to peek behind the curtains of power. This is how we can uncover how our infrastructure is built, which lobbies have a stake in a new law, and how the people we elect communicate among themselves.

The weakening of transparency laws means less state accountability and represents another blow to German democracy. Yet, from a rightwing perspective and the ‘Zeitenwende’ or ‘turning point’ narrative, they make perfect sense: becoming Europe’s strongest military superpower will be hard, shady deals will happen—better if we know nothing about them.

NRW wasted thousands in public money to silence a Palestinian activist, yet they lost twice

Repression in Berlin – report #7


08/04/2026

The recent court ruling in the case of Ahmad Othman, a Palestinian-German activist in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), shows that the German state’s repression isn’t just brutal – at times it is also remarkably incompetent in its attempt to disregard the laws it claims to uphold.

Ahmad, who was active in the group Palästina Solidarität Duisburg (PSDU), – which was banned by the Ministry of Interior in May 2024 – had been working as a technician for the federal state of NRW.

However, after PDSU was banned, his employer tried to fire him precisely because of this political activism. Yet despite having hired a law firm with 60 lawyers at its disposal, the state of NRW could not convince the court of the lawfulness of Ahmad’s firing in the first or second instance.

In April 2025, the Dortmund Labour Court ruled his first dismissal invalid. NRW then issued a second, nearly identical termination – which a court also struck down on 26 March 2026.

In the latest hearing, NRW couldn’t provide a single example of misconduct or prove that Othman posed any security risk. Desperate, they shifted to pure political persecution: calling the slogan “From the river to the sea” a Hamas symbol (despite court rulings to the contrary), and even threatening criminal charges for using a red triangle or the word “nonsense” about CDU minister Herbert Reul. However, as in the first instance the judge wasn’t convinced.

The victory came after two years of state efforts to wear Ahmad down. From non-compliance with deadlines to providing false reasons for the termination to the Agentur für Arbeit, leading to a benefits block, and to refusing to pay back his full salary after he won the first instance by placing him deliberately in another tax category with substantially lower pay: NRW tried to pull all the registers to unlawfully punish the activist.

But the intimidation did not stop at the courthouse door. After the won case on March 26, as Ahmad thanked supporters, around five police officers stormed into the crowd. With batons drawn, they dragged him away – claiming his chant “Yallah Intifada” might constitute a crime and thus absurdly stated they need to verify his identity.

Despite multiple and prolonged state attempts at intimidation and deterrence of his surroundings, the activist stayed joyful, optimistic and strong. After winning against his employer, Ahmad is now filing criminal complaints against the police officers with his lawyers. The fight continues.

9 April 1948 – The Deir Yassin Massacre

This week in working class history


07/04/2026

Just before dawn on Friday 9th April 1948, two Jewish militias – the Irgun and the Stern Gang (also known as Lehi) – attacked the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin, near West Jerusalem. The Zionist militias who were the precursor to the Israeli army, the IDF, went through the village, throwing hand grenades into every house, before entering and butchering the inhabitants. Villagers were then allowed to flee the village as a warning to occupants of neighbouring villages. 

How could the Deir Yassin massacre happen? In November 1947, the UN ordered the partition of Palestine. 56% of the country was awarded to Jews who had until then only controlled 6% of the land. This was not enough for Zionist leaders like David Ben Gurion, later first prime minister of Israel, who said: “There are 40% non-Jews in the areas allocated to the Jewish state. Such a demographic balance questions our ability to maintain Jewish sovereignty. Only a state with at least 80% Jews is a viable and stable state”. 

To achieve this state with at least 80% Jews, Zionist forces started to organise the forced expulsion of Palestinians, the Nakba. Unlike recent attacks on Gaza, the aim was not extermination but expulsion. It is thought that around 100 Palestinians died in Deir Yassin, but their attackers inflated  the figures, so as to encourage Palestinians in neighbouring villages to flee. By the end of the Nakba, 750,000 Palestinians – half the country’s population – had been forcefully expelled.

In his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Israeli anti-Zionist historian Ilan Pappe argues that Deir Yassin was the start of Plan Dalet, the blueprint for  the occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Pappe wrote: “The systematic nature of Plan Dalet is manifested in Deir Yassin, a pastoral and cordial village that had reached a non-aggression pact with the Hagana in Jerusalem, but was doomed to be wiped out because it was within the areas designated in Plan Dalet to be cleansed.”

Deir Yassin was by no means the largest massacre of Arabs in 1948, but it showed that Palestinians would not be welcome in the new Israeli state; at best, they would be second-class citizens in their own country. Israeli historian Benny Morris later wrote that Deir Yassin “probably had the most lasting effect of any single event of the war in precipitating the flight of Arab villagers from Palestine.” The following month, the State of Israel was formed on the back of the expulsions and killings which started at Deir Yassin.

Changing the heart and soul

Reflecting on how neoliberalism has changed society in the past 45 years (for the worse)


06/04/2026

Black and white photo of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher playing the drums.

Have you ever tried to hum your alarm tone in the middle of the day? Despite it being one of my most listened-to songs, the daze in which I usually find myself listening to it means I can never quite recall what it actually sounds like. Anyway—whatever it sounds like—it went off at 6:15am, it being a weekday.

I’m a teaching assistant who is regularly assigned to various schools around the city to cover for others who are sick or on holiday. Sometimes I’ll be at a school for a week or two, though often just a couple of days. My assignments are mediated by a ‘recruitment agency’ (read ‘middle-man’) and when a school needs a supply teacher, they contact the agency, who links them up with me. Sometimes this means waking up and getting ready for work before knowing whether I will actually be working or not. On this particular day, the call didn’t come. These middle-men often charge schools up to twice the amount they pay the teachers, amassing huge profits from state budgets for doing very little.

I could continue writing this as a piece about another example of how private companies drain public money and fill the pockets of shareholders with profits skimmed off the top. But I would like to talk about how the above scene of a fruitless wakeup call—the uncertainty, the middle-men, the isolation—is a small piece reflecting a larger social revolution that was launched in the 1970s, and became dominant the world over in the decades that followed.

In the UK, supply teachers like me used to belong to a pool managed by the local council. A school in need of a supply would be linked up with one by the council and the school would pay a standard fee. No room for profits—simple.

In 1979, the new Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, decided that these systems were inefficient and should be subject to ‘marketisation’ along with the rest of the economy. This meant opening up previously unexploited areas for the private companies to insert their tendrils. The public pools of supply teachers were almost completely replaced by commercial agencies in England and Wales, a few of which now dominate the market, and supply teachers the rare access to secure work and pension schemes. A typical story of the neoliberal revolution.

And yet, it would be a mistake to view neoliberalism as an amoral project. Thatcher was a social engineer who viewed economic policies as the tools with which to change society. “Economics are the method,” she told a Sunday Times reporter in 1981, “the object is to change the heart and soul.” So, 45 years later, are our hearts and souls changed?

The neoliberal view of the human condition is one where the threat of destitution hanging over our heads is what disciplines us into waking up to our alarms; where the possibility of poverty motivates our sense of personal responsibility; and where the distant chance of amassing a fortune encourages us to strive. The outcome of a collectivist society, they say, is one of lazy individuals; the outcome of the individualist society is a wealthier collective. Thatcher even claimed, “There is no such thing as society. There is only the individual and his family.”

So this was the vision, and for us to view ourselves as individuals in competition with each other, social bonds had to be broken and reorganised. Trade unions—an organising focal point outside of the state—were systematically weakened, markets were deregulated to allow the accumulation of huge private fortunes, and people were encouraged to become shareholders and homeowners. Each family was to become an island. Whether the family next door was struggling was none of our business. It almost feels too obvious to state that we aren’t better off because of it.

And yet the project has never been discredited. That is because the transformation was so total that it now passes for common sense. Think of the black-pilled crypto-investor who sees an investment portfolio as his path to wealth and comfort; the young couple living with a parent and working extra hours to get on the housing ladder and start their very own family unit; and the newly-qualified professional, endlessly refining their CV to be noticed among a sea of applicants for a single opening. Each is absorbed in an inward struggle, yet together they could demand luxury, housing, and employment for all. This is the neoliberal social revolution.

The revolution was complete when other visions of society became utopian and unserious. By the 1990s, the basic questions of how we structure our economies and social worlds were considered settled, and economics underwent a makeover. No longer was it ‘the method’ of achieving a particular moral vision of society, but rather it was a neutral science of experts arguing over the right formula that would send us soaring towards prosperity. Economists began to model themselves on natural scientists, as if they were meteorologists tracking wind-patterns and predicting hurricanes. Economics stopped being a means to an end, and became the end in and of itself. This is perhaps the neoliberal revolution’s greatest achievement.

To see this is to demystify economics and understand how it shapes our social worlds—from the uncertainty of daily life, to the routines of work, and the ways we relate to others. Seeing the systems behind our daily routine confirms what we already feel: that the atomised conditions we live in aren’t natural. Unlike the weather, economies are shaped by human hands, and so can be remoulded.

If economics is the method, then building associations on the ground alters the balance of power, whether it be through tenants’ unions, community projects, or mutual support in our workplaces and neighbourhoods. Each is work towards a movement capable of taking the reins of our economies and commanding a different society into being. It means trying to live, as far as we can, as though the society we wish to see already exists.

In the words of Howard Zinn, “the future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvellous victory… small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.”