‘Once Upon a Time in Gaza’ movie review: A Fistful of Falasteen in Gazawood

For filmmakers Arab and Tarzan Nasser, duplicate brothers calved and raised successful Gaza City earlier relocating to Jordan successful 2012, cinema has provided a means of documenting a world that overmuch of the satellite imagines lone done the latest updates successful decease tolls. Their erstwhile features, Dégradé (2015) and Gaza Mon Amour (2020), approached beingness wrong the Palestinian enclave done sharply observed idiosyncratic stories. And with their latest Once Upon a Time successful Gaza, which premiered successful the Un Certain Regard conception of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival and won the section’s Best Director prize, the brothers grow that task into thing considerably much self-reflexive, utilizing the communicative of a low-budget absorption movie to interrogate who gets to make and power images of Palestine. 

Set betwixt 2007 and 2009, successful the years instantly pursuing Hamas’ consolidation of powerfulness successful the Gaza strip, the movie examines however mean radical navigated a metropolis nether blockade whose opportunities and freedoms were steadily narrowing. The rubric evokes the mythmaking grandeur of Sergio Leone, yet the movie is rooted successful the densely layered realities of Gaza City.

The movie opens with Donald Trump’s caller real-estate brochure fantasy, describing Gaza arsenic a aboriginal “Riviera of the Middle East” — the antipathy of which feels truthful detached from the territory’s past that the Nasser brothers scarcely request to satirise it themselves. The aboriginal juxtaposition establishes the film’s cardinal conceit from the outset: the gulf betwixt the images projected onto Gaza and the acold messier world experienced by the radical forced to unrecorded wrong those narratives. 

Osama (Majd Eid), operates a cramped falafel store that doubles arsenic a organisation constituent for illegally acquired medicine painkillers. His adjunct Yahya (Nader Abd Alhay), spends his days stuffing pills wrong sandwiches portion dreaming of an beingness larger than the suffocating geography that contains him. The cognition itself is absurdly modest, yet the Nassers look tuned to however small-scale transgression economies specified arsenic these look from desperation fueled by governmental conditions.

There is simply a morbid gag lurking beneath the opening premise that the Nassers are acold excessively astute to spell out. Osama’s large clandestine concern is cornering the achromatic marketplace connected medicine painkillers wrong a territory practically numbed by implicit 78 years of inconceivable suffering. But everybody progressive seems to recognize the medicine is addressing the slightest consequential root of pain. 

There is besides thing profoundly moving astir watching characters rip bongs and shovelling falafel into their faces portion their metropolis is bombed successful existent clip due to the fact that it rejects the patronising anticipation that radical surviving done past indispensable walk each waking infinitesimal performing it. The falafel store creation series is astir apt the closest the movie comes to outright exuberance, instantly recalling Anurag Kashyap’s acquisition for uncovering moments of communal merchandise wrong stories governed by violence.

This archetypal question culminates successful Osama’s unsafe narration with Abou Sami, a narcotics serviceman played by Ramzi Maqdisi. Abou Sami wants a stock of the concern and expects practice done intimidation. The Nassers conception this struggle with patience framing the corruption arsenic Arendtian regular —  Abou Sami is conscionable different fig exploiting a strategy already structured astir unequal power. When unit yet erupts, the consequences consciousness inevitable due to the fact that each preceding enactment has established the mechanisms that nutrient it.

A two-year clip leap transforms the movie into thing considerably much ambitious. Yahya, present isolated and visibly shaped by trauma, is approached by a manager moving for Gaza’s Ministry of Culture due to the fact that helium bears an uncanny resemblance to a deceased militant. The ministry is producing The Rebel, described arsenic the archetypal enactment movie made successful Gaza, and Yahya is offered the pb role. This premise allows the Nassers to physique a promising film-within-a-film operation that interrogates however governmental myths are manufactured. Since the accumulation lacks wealth for ocular effects, actors occurrence existent weapons and execute enactment sequences with loaded ammunition. The task designed to make heroic images truthful becomes entangled with precise existent danger, collapsing the partition betwixt show and lived reality.

The strongest sections of Once Upon a Time successful Gaza look from this accumulation process. Palestinian actors dressed arsenic Israeli soldiers rotation done locations wherever bewildered bystanders mistake them for the genuine article. Government officials present speeches celebrating the intifada portion presiding implicit a accumulation whose logistical chaos borders connected farce. The manager adjacent treats each setback arsenic grounds that ‘Gazawood’ is connected the verge of greatness. Cumulatively, the tone down these aspirations remains sincere, and the Nassers successfully find humour successful organization incompetence without reducing their characters to caricatures.

Nader Abd Alhay carries astir of the film’s shifting tonal demands. Yahya begins arsenic a timid assemblage pupil trapped wrong Osama’s schemes, past gradually evolves into a reluctant subordinate successful a state-sponsored mythology that forces him to inhabit different man’s identity. The screenplay repeatedly returns to the ways show reshapes self-perception. Yahya initially accepts the relation for applicable reasons, yet each successive country reveals however profoundly helium internalises the revolutionary fig helium has been hired to portray. By the last act, vengeance and show go inseparable motivations for him.

Christophe Graillot’s cinematography reinforces this thematic model done cautiously modulated ocular textures. Shots of night-time streets glow beneath scattered artificial light, interiors consciousness compressed by stifling architecture and circumstance, and the deliberately pulpy aesthetics of The Rebel are acceptable against the grounded ocular realism that perpetually reminds america of the worldly conditions surrounding the production.

But the film’s structural gamble does make limitations. The modulation betwixt the falafel store communicative and the filmmaking communicative generates a impermanent nonaccomplishment of momentum, and the climactic confrontation packs little of a punch than the preceding setup promises. Yet, those imperfections consciousness inseparable from a task attempting to seizure the instability of a nine wherever personal, governmental and cinematic fantasies continuously collide.

What yet distinguishes Once Upon a Time successful Gaza is its repudiation of the flattening regard done which Palestine is truthful often consumed. Eschewing the archtypal embodiments of suffering oregon resilience, the Nasser brothers’ look determined to reclaim Gaza from the tyranny of its ain representation. By grounding the movie successful mundane negotiations of endurance and a wicked strain of humour, the Nassers conception a rich, subversive representation of Gaza, by Gaza and for Gaza.

Once Upon a Time successful Gaza is disposable to rent oregon acquisition connected BookMyShow Streama