Review: Sew Torn

Posted on December 20, 2025 by philipbrasor

Yet another acclaimed short subject expanded into a feature, Freddy Macdonald’s crime comedy definitely feels over-extended, but its main problem is that it’s weird for no good reason. First of all, it takes place in a small Swiss village where all the characters speak English with various Anglo accents. Second of all, the protagonist is a “mobile seamstress” whose skills with needle and thread are supposed to be the selling point of the movie. And thirdly, the plot structure is split into three what-if possibilities that never cohere in a way that justifies the conceit. 

Barbara (Eve Connolly) has inherited the business from her late mother, who died under extremely tragic circumstances it seems. She’s a depressive soul who makes talking portraits: needlepoint tapestry recreations of photos of her and her mother backed by chip-recorded loops of their conversations. She’s going out of business because, well, who these days really requires a mobile seamstress? One nasty customer, a middle aged woman who is getting married, harries Barbara relentlessly to get her wedding dress repaired in time for the ceremony, and Barbara butter-fingers it, thus requiring a return to the shop to get a new button. Along the way she happens upon a road accident involving two motorcycles, two badly injured men, two guns, some packages of what looks like heroin/cocaine, and a briefcase of cash. Immediately she sizes up the possibilities: should she a) pull off the “perfect crime,” b) call the police, or c) drive away? Macdonald explores all three possibilities in witty ways, all involving Barbara’s facility with darning and knot-making so as to solve immediate problems. She’s like the Rube Goldberg of colored rayon thread. As any fan of this genre of crime movie will tell you, a little of this kind of thing goes a long way, and here we get three instances of Barbara’s ingenuity that don’t differ enough in substance to make any of them more interesting than the last one, so by the end of the movie you may be needled out. 

More significantly, the crime under scrutiny is trite, as if Macdonald had studied a bunch of B-movies about drug deals gone wrong and distilled them, resulting in a flavorless concoction. Though there are a few good jokes—the old lady who acts as the village’s resident police chief and justice-of-the-peace is a hoot-and-a-half—most of the comedy is subsumed in the complications of Barbara’s inventions, thus rendering it inert. Since I haven’t seen the original short subject, I can’t comment on it, but I imagine its economy is what made it interesting, and funny.

Now playing in Tokyo at Cinema Qualite Shinjuku (03-3352-5645), Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608). 

Sew Torn home page in Japanese

photo (c) Sew Torn, LLC

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Review: Magazine Dreams

Posted on December 19, 2025 by philipbrasor

Though a bona fide indie, this sophomore feature by Elijah Bynum comes across as a fairly big production owing to its star, Jonathan Majors, who at the time it was made was riding high as box office contender, having scored critical raves in various features and a central ongoing role in the MCU. Since then, Majors has been accused of domestic abuse and his light has gone out, so Magazine Dreams could be his last leading part for a while—or forever. Since subtext is everything these days, it’s impossible not to read what happened to him (or what he did to himself) into this tale of a bodybuilder with self-image problems who explodes into violence when pressure gets to be too much. Story-wise, it sticks conventionally to movies about self-absorbed men who live on the margins, the kind of thing that Paul Schrader has made into a cottage industry, and Byrum often seems to be checking the boxes along the way, as if there were a manual for this kind of theme. But he’s got one element that distinguishes the film from its ilk: Killian Maddox’s race, which Byrum incorporates skillfully and, at first, subtly into the development.

The movie starts full bore, with Maddox already manifesting violent tendencies as his state-ordered therapist/social worker (Harriet Sansom Harris) tries to get him to admit to his darker impulses. Like a petulant child, he refuses to acknowledge them. At home he is obsessed with bodybuilding, his walls festooned with the magazine cover photos of his hero, a white guy named Brad Vanderhorn (real-life bodybuilder Mike O’Hearn). He lives with his grandfather, a retired, disabled Vietnam veteran (Harrison Page) who needs a certain level of care that only adds to Maddox’s guilt trip. He works at a supermarket where he scares the customers, though at one point he makes a date with a shy, white cashier, whom he later freaks out when they go out to dinner and he orders about 6,000 calories worth of food. The idea is that he’s just being himself, but being himself is off-putting to others, especially if they’re white. The first instance of acting out is a doozy. He calls a company that painted his grandfather’s house to complain that they did a bad job, and when they blow him off unceremoniously, he stomps down to the store and trashes the place. Later, of course, the store manager and some goons show up to give Maddox a proper beating, yelling racial slurs in the process. Byrum suggests that Maddox’s liberal steroid use only adds to his rage, but Majors is very good at telegraphing Maddox’s inherent insecurities through vocal inflections and changes in posture. 

Magazine Dreams is a very difficult movie to watch, since Maddox’s self-induced humiliations are so relentless and inevitable. No one, not even his therapist, attempts to connect with him on his level, and he picks up on these slights with the sensitivity of an exposed nerve ending. The cognitive dissonance remains intense because of Majors’ incredible physique, which adds immeasurably to the unfortunate subtext: another actor who went through a lot of pain just for a movie (though he reportedly was already bulked up, having just completed one of the Creed sequels). It takes nothing away from the performance, but in the end it takes something away from the movie, which is accomplished and dramatically affecting but depressing without being redemptive.

Now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831). 

 Magazine Dreams home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2023 LAMF Magazine Dreams LLC

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Review: A Big Bold Beautiful Journey

Posted on December 18, 2025 by philipbrasor

I would normally advise filmmakers to steer away from ironic movie titles unless their movies were explicitly comedies, but I’m really not sure if the title of Korean-American director Kogonada’s romantic fantasy is supposed to be ironic. Certainly there are comic elements at play, mainly in the whole premise of a would-be couple being Shanghaied by their respective rental cars’ GPS into taking trips to the past to uncover the Freudian sources of their difficulties in committing to long-lasting relationships. If the title is not meant to be ironic, then it will likely repel a certain group of moviegoers who actually might appreciate its storytelling craft and witty dialogue, but, in the end, it peddles exactly the kind of New Age didacticism that you fear it would.

Kogonada gets more help than he probably deserves from his high-wattage leads. Colin Farrell is David, a resident of an unidentified big East Coast city, probably New York, who is about to drive to a wedding when he discovers his car has been wheel-locked due to a parking violation. A helpful flyer on a wall facing his car advertises a mysterious car rental agency located in a cavernous, abandoned garage and manned by two very ironic employees, one of whom is played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge sporting a weird German accent. Despite David’s initial protestations, these two insist he take the GPS option, whose AI voice not only soothingly gets him to the church on time, so to speak, but gives him unsolicited advice for living. It also seems to control the weather. At the wedding, he is introduced to Sarah (Margot Robbie), a meeting that is obviously supposed to mean something, but neither seems sufficiently interested in the other to seek an extension of their acquaintanceship, so they part following the reception only to be reunited by their nosey GPS trackers—yes, Sarah rented her care from the same company. The GPS then leads them into weird doorways in remote, gorgeously lit locations that act as portals to episodes in their past that had some seminal effect on molding their personalities, which the movie tells us in no uncertain terms are damaged by trauma and heartbreak—in David’s case an almost fatal health condition and the quashing of his professional dreams, and in Sarah’s the death of her mother. Though none of these episodes really clarify the deficiencies they’re meant to clarify, isolated from the overall movie they provide more in the way of entertainment, especially Farrell’s game and very accomplished stab at the lead in How to Succeed in Business Without Even Trying, which he once played in a high school production. 

It’s difficult to know how to read these episodes because they don’t provide any meaningful reflections, only building blocks to a kind of amorphous plot. The point seems to be that our two would-be lovers missed the real significance of these experiences the first time and are now being given the chance to appreciate them for what they were, but the situations themselves are so hackneyed as edification that they don’t make much of an impression. Consequently, there’s no buildup of dramatic tension that would make the inevitable connection between David and Sarah satisfying. It’s all inertia, which is sort of what you would expect from a love affair brought about by your car’s GPS system; meaning, it should have been funnier.

Opens Dec. 19 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024). 

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey home page in Japanese

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The Passion of Shiori Ito

Posted on December 16, 2025 by philipbrasor

I first saw Shiori Ito’s documentary, Black Box Diaries, about her struggle to bring the man who raped her to some kind of justice, in Oct. 2024 at the Busan International Film Festival. At the opening night reception, the American producer of the film, Eric Nyari, introduced me to Ito, who seemed to be on top of the world. Her movie had premiered at Sundance earlier in the year and had already played several film festivals. At BIFF she exuded the attitude of a total winner. During the opening ceremony, she literally danced down the red carpet, whooping it up along the way. This behavior contrasted starkly with the tone of Black Box Diaries, which is overcast with frustration and, at times, acute depression due to the obstacles Ito faced in trying to get others, in particular the Japanese authorities, to take her accusations against her rapist seriously. It’s only through sheer tenacity that she gets anyone to listen to her because in Japan (and many other places in the world, I imagine) it’s just not considered polite to talk about these matters in public. Consequently, the cognitive dissonance I experienced upon encountering her in person was strong, and immediately I checked myself, because Shiori Ito is many things and “victim” is one that she would probably prefer to minimize. But over the past year, as her movie has failed to find distribution in her native Japan despite already being nominated for an Academy Award and winning a Peabody, it seemed obvious to me that many people in Japan think she should follow the decorum appropriate for a victim, or worse.

The image she has been most keen to project is that of a journalist, which she is, at least in terms of professional aspiration. It’s been this image that has proved most contentious among a certain group of critics in Japan who accuse her of sidestepping journalistic ethics in order to achieve the agenda attempted by the documentary. This criticism has been one of the main stumbling blocks that’s prevented the movie from being shown in Japan. During the press conference at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan on Dec. 15, where the newly edited version of Black Box Diaries was shown to the press, Nyari mentioned that after Sundance foreign distribution came fairly easily, but he knew Japan might be more of a problem because of distributors’ “fear of authorities,” since, in the movie, Ito suggests that the arrest of her rapist was quashed by “higher-ups.” The accused rapist, veteran reporter Noriyuki Yamaguchi, wrote an authorized biography of late Prime Minister Shinzo Abe that was about to be published when the arrest was initially supposed to take place. However, when Ito’s lawyer, Yoko Nishihiro, said that Ito had not properly sought permission from several sources in the documentary and used CCTV footage from the hotel the night of her rape without the hotel’s authorization, the original release date was postponed indefinitely. As condemnation of Ito’s methods rose the release went into limbo.

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Review: By the Stream

Posted on December 13, 2025 by philipbrasor

It’s such a delight to see Kim Min-hee again in a leading role. Though everyone knows that Kim is filmmaker Hong Sangsoo’s partner in both life and commerce, she’s also one of Korea’s best actors, and since becoming Hong’s most important behind-the-scenes facilitator she hasn’t done much in front of the camera. In By the Stream she plays an art teacher, Jeonim, at a women’s college who has been pushed into a hard place by her superiors. The school is having a drama festival and another instructor (Ha Seong-guk), a man, was directing a sketch when it is discovered that he was perhaps romantically involved with several of the students under his direction. Jeonim has been assigned to take his place and since she is mainly a visual artist she doesn’t think she has what it takes to direct actors, so she calls up her uncle, Chu Sieon (Kwon Hae-hyo), who was once a noted actor and director to assist. He seems only too happy to help.

That’s because some years before he himself was involved in a scandal that effectively ended his career, though in his case the scandal was political in nature. He now runs a bookstore in another town but apparently has a lot of time, and Jeonim gives him free rein with the students who are creating and performing the sketch. Though Hong shows us the rehearsals and some of the brainstorming that goes into the production, as usual he’s more interested in observing how these characters interact in more casual settings, whether drinking in a restaurant, hanging out in the teachers’ rooms, or just chatting by the titular stream, which seems to be Jeonim’s favorite place to think. In these conversations we pick up on Jeonim’s misgivings about asking her uncle to get involved in her work, mainly because he seems to have attracted the attention of her professional mentor, Jeong (Cho Yun-hee), who, despite the fact that Sieon’s reputation as a trouble-maker has preceded him, finds him charming in what Jeonim thinks is an unwholesome way. Meanwhile, the sketch may be headed toward the same kind of backlash that made Sieon persona non grata in the world of professsional drama. 

This is a lot of plot for a Hong Sangsoo movie, but as with the participation of Kim Min-hee the potboiler nature of the writing is quite refreshing, even if Hong isn’t the most reliable storyteller. He never explains the details of Sieon’s fall from grace and many of the plot developments happen either off-screen or in overheard conversations. These tactics nevertheless make By the Stream one of Hong’s most emotionally tense movies, even as his characters constantly set themselves up, almost hilariously, for behavioral pratfalls. When the disgraced teacher shows up to check on how the sketch is going, Sieon patronizes him and unwisely tries to bring him back into the production, if only tangentially. He’s not being perverse. If anything, he’s magnanimous, but it only goes to show, as with any male character in a Hong movie, that he’ll never learn. 

In Korean. Now playing in Tokyo at Euro Space Shibuya (03-3461-0211).

By the Stream home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2024 Jeonwonsa Film Co. 

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Review: Eddington

Posted on December 12, 2025 by philipbrasor

A lot of critics have labeled Ari Aster’s latest provocation a modern Western owing to certain superficial signifiers—cowboy hats, a desert-adjacent setting—but to me it’s closer in spirit to Breaking Bad, and not just because the titular town is in New Mexico. Aster successfully conjures up a place that feels untethered, as if it had been built yesterday, its faux-suburban facade struggling to pass itself off as genuine small town America. Breaking Bad, which presented Albuquerque as a city whose economic identity is built on criminal activity, had a similar vibe that affected every facet of the story and characters. One of the subplots of Eddington has the local Indian residents complaining about how their land has been repurposed without their permission, mainly by a big tech company that’s building a huge data center on the outskirts of Eddington. So when COVID comes to town, it just further undermines an already shaky foundation.

The conflict is between the town’s sherriff, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), and the town’s mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal). Garcia has implemented mandatory social distancing and mask regulations, while Cross thinks they’re overkill and isn’t keen on enforcing them. When push comes literally to shove in a local supermarket, Cross decides to run against Garcia in the next election for mayor, and Aster, whose comic smarts were not really exercised to their fullest in his previous films, sets up Cross’s campaign as supreme farce. As it soon becomes clear, Cross’s gripe with Garcia is personal, which makes the enmity that much more difficult to mitigate and inflates the nominally political battle into something more deadly. Complicating Cross’s ambitions is his emotionally troubled wife, Louise (Emma Stone), who, confined to home due to lockdown, falls under the spell of her conspiracy-addled mother (Dierdre O’Connell), who hooks her up with a charismatic motivational speaker (Austin Butler). Other controversies-of-the-moment affecting the mayoral campaign include the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements. As Phoenix plays him, Cross is a monumentally insecure man who finds himself in a public position that calls for a kind of hyper-masculine assertiveness, and in trying to fit that image he runs off the rails in an extremely reckless manner. 

Aster has never been afraid of taking his premises to their wildest conclusions, and he does a neat job of bringing all the various elements together in a climactic showdown that has to be seen to be believed—even if its narrative endpoints are not believable at all. Aster’s idea is that America is at the tipping point of senselessness in its civic integrity. He doesn’t bother distinguishing between ideologies or political preferences. Everyone has had a hand in driving the democratic experiment off a cliff, and he’s just there to film the wreck in slow motion. 

Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), 109 Cinemas Premium Shinjuku (0570-060-109), Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Toho Cinemas Roppongi Hills (050-6868-5024).

Eddington home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2025 Joe Cross For Mayor Rights LLC

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Review: Shelby Oaks

Posted on December 11, 2025 by philipbrasor

As the old truism goes, write what you know, advice that YouTube movie critic Chris Stuckmann follows for the opening 20 minutes or so of his debut horror feature. Making fairly good use of the found footage device that made The Blair Witch Project a phenomenon 25 years ago, he sets up a situation that immediately draws the audience in: A quartet of online ghostbusters who have garnered a loyal and growing following go missing while investigating an abandoned prison for evil spirits on the outskirts of the town of Shelby Oaks, which has also been abandoned. Eventually, the mutilated bodies of three of the members are found in a vacant house, and the search for the remaining member, Riley Brennan (Sarah Dunn), intensifies. All this background is presented in the form of mock footage of news reports, the final creepy tape the group shot at the prison, and a documentary about Riley’s older sister, Mia (Camille Sullivan), who, as the film opens, says she still believes her sister is alive twelve years after the disappearance. Then, in the movie’s only truly original scene, a guy comes to her door while the doc crew is there and blows his brains out, at which point the opening credits roll and the movie descends into total mediocrity.

The dead guy had come bearing further clues into Riley’s disappearance, clues that Mia hides from the police because, as she tells her skeptical husband (Brendan Sexton III), once the police get hold of this evidence they’ll close the case, and she intends to keep following it until she finds Riley herself. Though Stuckmann, with the help of his able cinematographer, Andrew Scott Baird, ramps up the suspense as Mia reexplores the decaying prison and overgrown amusement park that was once Shelby Oaks’ main attraction, the story gets way too literal with its boogeyman aspects, and once the reasons for Riley’s disappearance and related supernatural shenanigans are revealed in tortuous detail the whole movie becomes a parody of itself.

In the end, Stuckmann returns temporarily to the mock documentary style, and in doing so regains some of his atmospheric footing, thus proving that he knows how media works, having himself become a digital media star through careful exploitation of algorithms and clicks; but he didn’t learn as much as he thinks he did through his film review gig except how to stage a jump scare. Despite all the narrative huffing and puffing involved to create a twisty horror flick, the plot doesn’t make much sense under scrutiny and, despite the brief running time, it feels overextended, but that may have more to do with the end credits, which go on forever since Stuckmann has to mention all the people who contributed to the film’s Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign, something he obviously has more practical knowledge about than making horror movies. 

Opens Dec. 12 in Tokyo at Shinjuku Piccadilly (050-6861-3011).

Shelby Oaks home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2024 Shelby Oaks LLC

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Review: The Shadow’s Edge

Posted on December 10, 2025 by philipbrasor

Though I wouldn’t take it as an accurate representation of the Chinese authorities’ feelings about the A.I. revolution, this expensive-looking Hong Kong actioner by Larry Yang, set in Macau and presented in Mandarin rather than Cantonese, does raise questions about how far you should trust the new technology with matters like law and order. The opening heist has more to do with hacking into the Macau police department’s CCTV system than with any analog skills such as safe-cracking or tunnel-digging. A lithe crew of young thieves steals a set of hard drives that contain data which could unlock a billion dollars’ worth of crypto currency by fooling the police surveillance software into thinking it is tracking their getaway when it isn’t. Obviously the new equipment doesn’t work as well as it’s been advertised to do so the old school police chief decides to bring in a retired cop who actually knows how to organize a stakeout. When we first meet Wong (Jackie Chan), he’s walking a kennel’s worth of dogs and seems keen to get back in the game. 

There’s no use in trying to make Chan look less than his age, so Yang takes advantage of this fact by pitting him against an equally grizzled bad guy known as the Shadow (Tony Leung Ka-fai), who himself is not much on new tech, and thus relies on a bunch of orphans he raised from childhood to be his partners-in-crime. This heist is meant to be his career-defining magnum opus, and Yang stages it all with a pompous rigor, showing how the intricate plans, using Mission Impossible-grade disguises and aerial equipment, easily outfoxes the constabulary. Wong’s job is to retrain the departments younger recruits, including the pint-sized daughter (Zhang Zifeng) of his former partner, who was killed in the line of action while Wong was distracted, to rely on their smarts and senses rather than on their gadgets. Yang does a good job of showing this educational process with a surveillance detail that seems to take a couple of weeks before Wong and his team locate the Shadow, whom no one has ever actually identified. 

While the dramatic components are as sentimentally shaped as you’d expect them to be—especially on the Shadow’s side where his charges have their doubts about his capacity to lead them effectively— and the shilling for the Wynn integrated resorts is a casino too far, the action is pretty cool. Obviously, neither Chan nor Leung can pull off the kinds of moves they performed with alacrity in their heyday, but thanks to some clever camera work and cutting their fights are still inventive, thrilling, and almost insanely witty, which, of course, is what Chan has always been about. Hardcore fans will probably prefer to savor the old movies, but if this is a swan song, it’s a pretty sweet one. 

In Mandarin and English. Opens Dec. 12 in Tokyo at Marunouchi Piccadilly (050-6875-0075), Shinjuku Wald 9 (03-5369-4955).

The Shadow’s Edge home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2025 Iqiyi Pictures (Beijing) Co., Ltd. Beijing Alibaba Pictures Culture Co., Ltd. Beijing Hairun Pictures Co., Ltd. 

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Review: Heavy Snow

Posted on December 6, 2025 by philipbrasor

Korean narrative entertainment, both movies and TV dramas, often exploits real world subtexts. Popular actors not only take roles that mirror some aspect of their private lives, but allude to those lives in their dialogue. The two lead actors in this impressionistic indie film play, at one point or another, popular TV drama actors and, in fact, both made their names in TV dramas. However, the director, Yun Su-ik, doesn’t take advantage of this idea the way a major studio production might. The gimmick is merely used to draw attention to the fact that these two characters, and thus the two actors playing them—who, coincidentally or not, share a surname—are spiritually connected in some way.

Soo-an (Han Hae-in) is a tomboyish student at a rural coed arts high school who is quite determined to become a professional actor despite periods of severe self-doubt. A transfer student named Seol (Han So-hee) admires her craft and Soo-an is quite flattered since Seol is already a professional actor and star, having entered show biz when she was 10 years old. The two quickly bond, more out of loneliness (their classmates are punishingly self-involved) than anything else, and it becomes evident during a spur-of-the-moment midnight sojourn to Seoul that Seol wants to be more than friends, but when they kiss in the vestibule of an apartment building Soo-an panics and the relationship grinds to a halt. Cut to some years later and the roles are reversed: Soo-an has made it as a TV star just as big as Seol once was, while Seol has mostly given up that life and hangs out near a beach where she spends her time surfing and getting drunk. The implication is that Soo-an’s rejection made her reevaluate her life. In the meantime, Soo-an’s nascent sexual attraction to Seol has blossomed in the sense that she is only drawn to other women, but at bottom she’s just as miserable as Seol is, resorting to drugs to alleviate her simmering regret.

Naturally, they reconnect and try to rekindle their mutual attraction, fueling it into something like real love, but Yun steers the story into fantasyland, with the two women paddling out to sea on their surfboards in the winter and getting stranded on a stretch of deserted coastline where, finally removed from society, they can consummate their feelings—or something like that. It’s not really clear what the last half hour means except that maybe you shouldn’t expect to win the love of someone else when you don’t know yourself first, which is a pretty bland theme. Yun takes a very promising story premise and turns it into a mediocre student art project. 

In Korean. Now playing in Tokyo at White Cine Quinto Shibuya (03-6712-7225), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978).

Heavy Snow home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2025 Elles Films Co., Ltd. 

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Review: Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk

Posted on December 5, 2025 by philipbrasor

The word “documentary” only applies to Sepideh Farsi’s film in a generic way. Though it certainly is a document of the exiled Iranian director’s nine-month WhatsApp video relationship with the young Palestinian photographer Fatma Hassona, its focus on that relationship at the expense of understanding the Gaza genocide in full makes it come across as something that isn’t meant to edify people who know little about what’s really happening in Gaza. If anything, its appeal as a recording is the way it highlights Hassona as a unique representative of the struggle it’s supposed to be describing. Hassona isn’t a mouthpiece or professional raconteur. Her English is passable, her knowledge of the politics behind the war sketchy, and her ability to convey her own circumstances into something universal unformed. But she makes up for all those things with an exuberance and a love of creative endeavor that’s more than infectious. It’s the very definition of life itself. Just listening to her stumble through her reports on the horrors around her and her attempts to bring the truth of Gaza to the world with her photos feels like a privilege, because we on this side of the screen know we could never be in her position and remain that expressive, that excited about being given the chance to bring her experience to a larger audience.

At the beginning of the film, Farsi explains that when the Gaza crisis exploded following the Hamas massacre, she was thrown back to her own adolescence in Iran during the revolution that overthrew the Shah and wanted to talk to someone in the occupied territory to confirm her feelings. Unable to physically access Gaza or anyone face-to-face who had such access, she resorted to her iPhone and was introduced to Hassona through a journalist friend. On paper, the matchup must have looked merely preliminary since Hassona had no real practical experience as a photojournalist beyond her social media presence, but the chemistry is immediate and binding despite constant interruptions to the feed (Israel purposely limits cell coverage in Gaza to 2G), which Farsi does not edit out, and Hassona’s difficulties with English, which may have to do more with her bursting desire to communicate than with any purely linguistic limitations. As Farsi, who mostly speaks from her home in Paris, eventually characterizes their online relationship, each converstaion is “like a miracle,” and not just because they manage to get through to each other despite the technical issues. Hassona’s invariably beaming countenance keeps Farsi’s fears about her interlocutor’s safety at bay for as long as they talk, and the viewer gets caught up in their rapport even as Hassona discusses loved ones who’ve been killed and her own family’s constant moving around to stay alive amidst the pummeling Israeli violence, which is often audible in the background. Hassona sees her job as documenting how everyday life continues under these conditions, and her photos do exactly that with a matter-of-factness that reflects her own impossible optimism: children playing, women cooking and cleaning, families moving their belongings to somewhere that might be safer for a little while, all against a backdrop of total destruction. Behind the sunny disposition is, of course, anxiety about loved ones she sometimes shares the screen with, and while she occasionally mentions her own lack of material welfare—at one point Farsi calls her from a beach in Greece where she’s obviously taking a break and Hassona gleefully exclaims, “I want your life!”—she insists that Gaza is her home and that is where she wants to stay, even when Farsi floats the possibility that she might be able to get her out of there.

To her credit, Farsi maintains a journalistic objectivity throughout their conversations, evincing from Hassona a reaction to the Oct. 7 massacre that many viewers may not be comfortable with (“We showed the world we can fight”), and even sparring over whether Hassona’s attachment to her hijab is warranted (“I’m too embarrased to take it off in public,” i.e., on screen). But in the end, the director’s own emotional attachment to the subject of what she never expected to be a feature-length documentary is palpable and moving. At one point, she almost breaks down over her inability to do something for Hassona and her community except publicize their suffering, and Hassona comforts her in return, “You are listening to me,” she says with that irrepressible smile. “You are beside me right now and that’s enough.”

In English and Arabic. Now playing in Tokyo at Human Trust Cinema Yurakucho (03-6259-8608), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551).

Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk home page in Japanese

photo (c) Sepideh Farsi Reves d’Eau Production

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