For filmmakers Arab and Tarzan Nasser, twin brothers born and raised in Gaza City before relocating to Jordan in 2012, cinema has provided a means of documenting a reality that much of the world imagines only through the latest updates in death tolls. Their previous features, Dégradé (2015) and Gaza Mon Amour (2020), approached life inside the Palestinian enclave through sharply observed personal stories. And with their latest Once Upon a Time in Gaza, which premiered in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2025 Cannes Film Festival and won the section’s Best Director prize, the brothers expand that project into something considerably more self-reflexive, using the story of a low-budget resistance film to interrogate who gets to create and control images of Palestine. 

Set between 2007 and 2009, in the years immediately following Hamas’ consolidation of power in the Gaza strip, the film examines how ordinary people navigated a city under blockade whose opportunities and freedoms were steadily narrowing. The title evokes the mythmaking grandeur of Sergio Leone, yet the film is rooted in the densely layered realities of Gaza City.

The film opens with Donald Trump’s recent real-estate brochure fantasy, describing Gaza as a future “Riviera of the Middle East” — the antipathy of which feels so detached from the territory’s history that the Nasser brothers scarcely need to satirise it themselves. The early juxtaposition establishes the film’s central conceit from the outset: the gulf between the images projected onto Gaza and the far messier reality experienced by the people forced to live within those narratives. 

Osama (Majd Eid), operates a cramped falafel shop that doubles as a distribution point for illegally acquired prescription painkillers. His assistant Yahya (Nader Abd Alhay), spends his days stuffing pills inside sandwiches while dreaming of an existence larger than the suffocating geography that contains him. The operation itself is absurdly modest, yet the Nassers seem tuned to how small-scale criminal economies such as these emerge from desperation fueled by political conditions.

There is a morbid joke lurking beneath the opening premise that the Nassers are far too smart to spell out. Osama’s great clandestine business is cornering the black market on prescription painkillers inside a territory practically numbed by over 78 years of inconceivable suffering. But everybody involved seems to understand the medication is addressing the least consequential source of pain. 

There is also something deeply moving about watching characters rip bongs and shovelling falafel into their faces while their city is bombed in real time because it rejects the patronising expectation that people living through history must spend every waking moment performing it. The falafel shop dance sequence is probably the closest the film comes to outright exuberance, immediately recalling Anurag Kashyap’s gift for finding moments of communal release inside stories governed by violence.

This first movement culminates in Osama’s dangerous relationship with Abou Sami, a narcotics officer played by Ramzi Maqdisi. Abou Sami wants a share of the business and expects cooperation through intimidation. The Nassers construct this conflict with patience framing the corruption as Arendtian routine —  Abou Sami is just another figure exploiting a system already structured around unequal power. When violence eventually erupts, the consequences feel inevitable because every preceding interaction has established the mechanisms that produce it.

A two-year time jump transforms the film into something considerably more ambitious. Yahya, now isolated and visibly shaped by trauma, is approached by a director working for Gaza’s Ministry of Culture because he bears an uncanny resemblance to a deceased militant. The ministry is producing The Rebel, described as the first action film made in Gaza, and Yahya is offered the lead role. This premise allows the Nassers to build a promising film-within-a-film structure that interrogates how political myths are manufactured. Since the production lacks money for visual effects, actors fire real weapons and perform action sequences with loaded ammunition. The project designed to create heroic images therefore becomes entangled with very real danger, collapsing the wall between performance and lived reality.

The strongest sections of Once Upon a Time in Gaza emerge from this production process. Palestinian actors dressed as Israeli soldiers wander through locations where bewildered bystanders mistake them for the genuine article. Government officials deliver speeches celebrating the intifada while presiding over a production whose logistical chaos borders on farce. The director even treats every setback as evidence that ‘Gazawood’ is on the verge of greatness. Cumulatively, the spirit behind these aspirations remains sincere, and the Nassers successfully locate humour in institutional incompetence without reducing their characters to caricatures.

Nader Abd Alhay carries most of the film’s shifting tonal demands. Yahya begins as a timid university student trapped within Osama’s schemes, then gradually evolves into a reluctant participant in a state-sponsored mythology that forces him to inhabit another man’s identity. The screenplay repeatedly returns to the ways performance reshapes self-perception. Yahya initially accepts the role for practical reasons, yet each successive scene reveals how deeply he internalises the revolutionary figure he has been hired to portray. By the final act, vengeance and performance become inseparable motivations for him.

Christophe Graillot’s cinematography reinforces this thematic framework through carefully modulated visual textures. Shots of night-time streets glow beneath scattered artificial light, interiors feel compressed by stifling architecture and circumstance, and the deliberately pulpy aesthetics of The Rebel are set against the grounded visual realism that constantly reminds us of the material conditions surrounding the production.

But the film’s structural gamble does create limitations. The transition between the falafel shop narrative and the filmmaking narrative generates a temporary loss of momentum, and the climactic confrontation packs less of a punch than the preceding setup promises. Yet, those imperfections feel inseparable from a project attempting to capture the instability of a society where personal, political and cinematic fantasies continuously collide.

What ultimately distinguishes Once Upon a Time in Gaza is its repudiation of the flattening gaze through which Palestine is so often consumed. Eschewing the archtypal embodiments of suffering or resilience, the Nasser brothers’ seem determined to reclaim Gaza from the tyranny of its own representation. By grounding the film in mundane negotiations of survival and a wicked strain of humour, the Nassers construct a rich, subversive portrait of Gaza, by Gaza and for Gaza.

Once Upon a Time in Gaza is available to rent or purchase on BookMyShow Streama