The present moment weighs heavily on Once Upon a Time in Gaza, a 2007-set crime thriller by maverick Palestinian directors Tarzan and Arab Nasser. And how could it not?
Before the film even begins, President Donald Trump’s comments in February play over the opening credits: “I think the potential in the Gaza Strip is unbelievable. We have the opportunity to do something phenomenal. I don’t want to be cute, I don’t want to be a wise guy, but the ‘Riviera of the Middle East’ – this could be so magnificent.”
Ten minutes later, in a surreal moment, Yahya (Nader Abd Alhay) and Osama (Majd Eid), the film’s lead characters, are discussing business in their falafel shop when an advertisement begins to play on the TV behind them.
“A golden opportunity for a beach holiday on the Riviera. Unwind beneath blue skies and the sun’s dazzling rays,” says a voice over footage of palm trees and pristine beaches. Both Yahya and Osama ignore it.
Osama has other things on his mind. He’s a drug dealer, stuffing a strip of tramadol pills in the sandwiches whenever customers request some of their finest falafels. And Abou Sami (Ramzi Maqdisi), the corrupt cop he’s been working with, has started pressuring him to name names of the people he works with. Osama refuses – a man must live by a code – and the conflict between the two begins to escalate.
For most crime films, especially one whose title references the spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone, that would be enough story to fill the entire movie. But Once Upon a Time in Gaza is far from an ordinary crime story – instead a layered, self-reflexive meditation on identity, resistance, and the cost of survival.
Halfway through, Osama’s story ends when he is killed by Abou Sami. We cut to 2009, and Yahya becomes the film’s new protagonist – and a deceptively simple tale becomes something decidedly more complex.
We get a hint of the shocking turn at the movie's beginning. After Trump’s overture, we see a funeral procession for Yahya, and then a trailer for a fake action film called The Rebel, in which Yahya stars as a militant figure caught in conflict with Israel.
In the second half, we watch that film being made. Yahya is approached in a cafe by the film’s director, who believes he has an uncanny resemblance to the “rebel” their film is about, and wants Yahya to star.
But Yahya never wanted to be an actor. He was once a business student whose ambitions of a grand career outside of Gaza ended when Israel denied his exit visa. Acting becomes an escape from himself, but not an easy one. At first, he’s unable to even say his lines.
Yahya shares a family name with the film’s writer-directors Tarzan and Arab Nasser. In real life, the twin brothers always dreamt of a life in film – but growing up, they were unable to even see a film in theatres. They were born in 1988, one year after the destruction of the enclave’s movie houses during the First Intifada – something they often lamented earlier in their careers.
But that doesn’t mean that films have never been shown in Gaza, nor that a feature has ever been shot there. In fact, in 2009, an action film Imad Aqel, was screened in a public square. The film was co-produced by Hamas and depicted the real-life attacks that Aqel mounted against the Israeli military in the 1980s and 1990s. At the time, Imad Aqel's director commented that he hoped the film would screen at Cannes. But the film was never made available outside of Gaza.
The Rebel, the film-within-a-film in Once Upon a Time in Gaza, bears more than a passing resemblance to Imad Aqel. And the scenes we see of The Rebel feel straight out of a low-budget straight-to-VHS action film from the 1990s, with guns blazing and dead bodies covered in bright-red fake blood.
At one point, Yahya attends a meeting between the filmmaking team and Hamas’s ministry of culture, in which they talk about The Rebel’s potential power as a piece of propaganda. Yahya remains blithely silent as the filmmakers reveal that, due to budget constraints, they can’t use special effects, and are using real guns for their action scenes – forebodingly turning their prop guns into Chekhov’s gun in an instant.
Directors Tarzan and Arab, who now reside in France, had a complicated relationship with Hamas authorities when they lived in Gaza. Early in their careers, they were detained and had their hard drive seized due to a misunderstanding about one of the posters in their art series Gaza Wood, for which the two brothers turned the names of Israel’s military operations in Gaza into fictional film posters.
“Filming and making movies is not the Hamas way,” Tarzan told The Guardian in 2011, with Arab adding: “Hamas has its mentality and perspectives. They want all art to be within their perspectives.”
Tarzan and Arab did not set out to make a political film with Once Upon a Time in Gaza, but also understand that the Gazan identity is inherently political, whether they like it or not. And with that in mind, the film ruminates on the impossibility of living an apolitical life under occupation.
And while the film unflinchingly examines flaws within Hamas’s leadership at that time, it also never lets the viewer forget the threat that Israel's occupation poses to their lives at all moments – nor loses sight that its treatment of Gaza is at the root of the issues. Often, the camera will drift upwards to show the viewer the Israeli surveillance drones that have hovered over the enclave since the early 2000s.
But first and foremost, this is a film about what it is like to exist in Gaza. The people depicted just want to live their lives with dignity and follow their dreams – each struggling with the reality that most of their dreams are actively prevented from coming true. But never will they just lay down to die – no matter what they are faced with, they persevere. Violence may beget more violence, as the film shows, but hope indefatigably endures, and the Gazan people will always find a way to survive with their pride intact.
Once Upon a Time in Gaza has its premiere in competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival today
